Reviews by Andrew Schultz

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Escape From Summerland, by Joey Jones and Melvin Rangasamy

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
You'll like the emoticons here. No, really., September 11, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2012

I feel Escape from Summerland may be underrated because it didn't get the IFComp reception it could have -- the authors were in a time crunch, and some bugs slipped through. Which is sad for those who maybe played it and got frustrated. It still may be frustrating with the bug fixes--but it's also a lot of fun, with very clever viewpoint switching and a lot of quirky humor.

You start off as a ghost who sees someone trapped in a tent. Seeing who they are gives a realization--you may be able to figure it out. Once his initial duties are performed, you switch to his pet monkey, which has a ... rather less nuanced version of things. Then once the monkey leaves her cage, you're the ghost, making sure she's safe. That done, you switch viewpoint to a robot. Its descriptions are technical and tough to decipher. But here's the twist: the more you observe and look around as the other players, the more you figure what they mean. And different items are described differently by Amadan (the ghost,) Jacquotte the monkey and Shinobi the robot. Shinobi appears to be some sort of drone from an outer-space invasion, not really malevolent but just obeying orders.

And with the three players' combined abilities, you switch perspectives until Jacquotte gets out of the park. It's fun but very tough. I've come back to EfS several times, and without the clues, I get stuck somewhere else. The puzzles make sense, but they're very sticky. There's a part-broken lift to operate, and pushing a box out of the way takes a while. Shinobi has lost both arms and is badly malfunctioning (the temperature gauge goes from -80 to 80 Celsius). And it is low on power, which is probably why the invaders desert it. And for big events, the power drops 2%. You may see where this is going. Will Shinobi have enough power?

EfS rapidly becomes a buddy-comedy but without the backslapping. Amadon, the least powerful, most knows what's going on. Shinobi, for its technical knowledge, has no clue what things are for. Jacquotte can reach places. Amadon actually needs to provoke Shinobi into an action, where Shinobi senses his presence without being aware he's, well, dead. And Jacquotte has fun with the buttons on the lift, as one always wanted to when one was much younger. Contrasting her with Shinobi is amusing, as she often reverts to emote-speak with no qualitative description, and Shinobi's technical descriptions include "Organic Pest Must Be Jettisoned Before Further Ambulation." In actual English, that means Shinobi must DROP PEST if Jacquotte has climbed, before moving on.

EfS also has neat touches beyond just the three entities seeing the same item in drastically different ways. Trying to change them to themselves gets clever responses. We realize that the amusement park is a sad place, poorly kept up even if there was no alien invasion. And ... well, there are still bugs hidden in there, so you may want to save after each small victory. Which sort of adds to the slog as the three entities push through, leading Jacquotte from her cage to freedom. And, yes, there is some guess-the-verb, due to the nature of how the three entities see the world, but I actually rather like the included hints. They help me stumble through, along with the three heroes.

EfS is a rare combination of charming and clever, where it's fun to take a step back and see what everyone sees even if there are pitfalls in he puzzles and parser. Once you get in the flow, it's clear the authors really knew what they were doing and had a great plan. I know after EfS I hoped and expected something even bigger and more polished. Sub Rosa, for IFComp 2015, was that. And it brings up a tough dilemma: would I rather have, say, EfS and Calm, or one Sub Rosa? I'll cop out here on my own question and say I'm glad we have both, since they're each unique in the IFComp landscape. And to say: EfS is worth taking another shot at, if you trip up at first. Even completing it with its hints/feelies by your side is extremely rewarding.

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Changes, by David Given

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Great story, tough start, tough end, September 11, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2012

Changes may have the most creative story from IFComp 2012: you wake up in the body of a rabbit, but with the mind of a human. This isn't some "intelligent rabbit" or Watership Down thing, here. You're on a person-free planet called Elysia. And you observe how you became a rabbit: animals are putting other animals into the same sort of pod you came out of, and they are switching bodies. They know this instinctively. So your main task is: how do I find what happened to my body?

I remember almost giving up on Changes because the start was unclear and hostile and even random. You had a very diligent fox chasing you around, and being able to sense animal emotions around you only did so much--if the fox wanted to play prevent defense randomly, gosh darn it, it would, until you got impatient, and only trial and error showed where you were safe (Oddly, you could also run past the fox if, say, you were south of it, it chased, and you went north. Hooray for mimesis and feeling fear?) It wasn't really clear what animal you'd want to become, as everyone else was bigger than you. The solution wasn't that clear to me, though it seems hinted in retrospect. Along the way I found a ton of insta-deaths. There was one place where I fell into a lake and drowned, because rabbits couldn't swim.

This is the big clue here, because you need to become something that can swim, and there's only one real animal that can. I didn't find it at all obvious how to kill them, though in retrospect, it makes sense. I guess the solution felt like something you'd see in a cartoon, and not a serious sci-fi work. But once I took the new animal's body, I saw more of what to do.

I did not drown in the lake, but my predator did. Then I managed to annoy another animal and kill them. There were deer to manipulate and avoid. I noticed an abandoned shuttle which, well, looked familiar. I needed to become an animal that had something resembling fingers--all through the game, I spent time dragging the bodies of animals I'd killed by their teeth, into the cocoon and then out.

Opening the space shuttle is the big thing, and while actually moving a human body back to near the pod (there's no animal big enough to carry the body) again feels a bit cartoonish to envision, it's pretty much "do what you can to cause a disturbance."

Nevertheless it's all very clever to watch and see unfold, and each time you change animal skins, you get a flashback detailing more of the story. Perhaps you'll be able to guess it sooner than I did. But even escaping in human form doesn't change anything. There's a mythical feel to Changes, including the ending, which is far from "you board the shuttle and race home, vowing never to get near Elysia again." There's a tale of human tragedy and conflict to unravel, and the feeling I had that I was disturbing something perfect and special was, in fact, validated by the end.

Some parts of Changes do feel a bit loose, and they stop it from soaring. There seem to be more locations than necessary, and chasing certain enemy animals gets exhausting. But the payoff is legitimately rewarding, and with Andromeda Apocalypse won the IFComp that year, I can't help but thing Changes would've had a shot with a good deal more polish.

As-is, I remember the author had a bug tracker with a lot fixed, and there were obviously a lot of different moving parts with several animal NPCs. They all act pretty simply, with beavers hissing or deer fleeing, but they build a world remarkably quickly with little need for detailed scenery. As someone who is indulgent about using walkthroughs and giving the author a mulligan for a puzzle or two that may be a logical jump too far, I really enjoyed Changes, even though the random events and NPCs bouncing around made it hard to execute. Perhaps it added to the feel that I, as (initially) a human, had trespassed somewhere I should not have been, in the name of progress. It combines eerie naturalism with sci-fi horror in a way I don't recall any other IFComp games doing.

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The Purple Pearl, by Amanda Walker

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Teamwork in a fishbowl, September 11, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Milo van Mesdag opened the Pandora's Box of two-player interactive fiction. It explored themes of oppression and war, pitting two characters against each other, leaving the players to suss things out later. The Purple Pearl feels more in the text adventure tradition. Yes, a purple pearl has been stolen, but the other player in this case is someone you cooperate with. You're both cordoned off into small cells. There's a way to shuttle items between rooms, and useless items are rejected. The game has separate binaries for the player in each cell. You can pass items between cells, and once you do so successfully, a code to give to your cooperator drops it into their game.

The Purple Pearl is a good, successful experiment, but if you think too hard, it does feel a lot more like an experiment more than the author's other works. You know you have stuff to solve, and you know it's not the real puzzle, and your main goal is just to get out and start your main adventure. So it doesn't have the usual emotional depth of one of the author's games. But it's still unique and fun and well-executed, and the puzzles, while not profound (they feel as though they've been done before and some, you can use brute force) require some lateral thinking. Receiving the player code once your partner did something, though was a nice surprise gift, as usually you have to keep hacking away or examining everything until you find a clue. Now you hope your partner has, or that they missed something. There was a good deal of encouragement between me and my partner no matter who went first. We wanted to get out of our cells, but it was nice not to have death hanging over us.

And the gifts? Well, they felt like a white elephant party, except they were useful. In one-player games, discovering such things might've seemed too random. I found, first playing one side than the other, it was still a fun surprise to receive an item I'd given, and vice versa. And I was glad the person I played with didn't reveal too much when they were briefly stuck. Purple Pearl has hints--or, more precisely, you can ask for hints to send to your teammate, so you can't spoil anything on your own--but neither of us needed them. (I did poke through them later. They're cheery and fun and do well to steer you only into what you need, with some rhymes that don't spoil things until you know what item they're talking about!) Generally, the items that you didn't need any more conveniently crumbled, which didn't leave much room for confusion.

The Purple Pearl is definitely replayable to see the other side. It took us about forty minutes the first time, then less than twenty for the other. Of course you can play both sides on your own, but I found it a bit difficult to keep track of, even though many puzzles were similar (three switches with three settings, a dial with three digits.) The main moments were the mystery of what might be coming my way, as if waiting for a holiday gift, or asking my partner what we should be looking for--we were walking a fine line between getting through our half of the game and not spoiling the other half, and it was pretty clear we each wanted to see how the other half worked, especially for the bit when we'd escaped our cells and were in a corridor with just one more thing to do. I think that is the main, lasting draw of The Purple Pearl. And it will be unique, unless a MUD version of Inform 7 becomes active again, with its own puzzles.

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Bug Hunt On Menelaus, by Larry Horsfield

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A nice intro to the Horsfieldverse. Wish there were more!, September 11, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: ParserComp 2023

I confess I've never really gotten into Larry Horsfield's work. Based on this, perhaps I should, or at least try to chip away at one of his works for a few minutes each day. It's odd. I'd have been bummed about a work as short as this as a kid, even if I could solve it, but now, given all the games there are out there to play, I want more like this. (I can't complain, of course, having my own series of decidedly old-school parser games that do their own thing.) It feels like a good introduction, even if it is the fifth in the Mike Erlin series, so it may've been a wake-up call to say, yes, scaling back the difficulty would be worth it. I'm glad it snuck into ParserComp under the deadline.

You, as Captain Mike Erlin, have a group of five subordinates whom you have delegated to help track down Meneltra, which -- well, they need to be shot, because they're big long ugly bugs that shoot acid and terrorize the town. You are to shoot them down with minimal property damage, then BECOME the next person in Erlin's troop. You can play with timed turns or not. The timed turns are a very close shave indeed, at eighty moves total.

Your team splits up at the nexus of a road, going every which way. One Meneltra is easily findable, and another is disguising itself among zampfs, aquatic creatures which need air, while Meneltra don't. You as the captain have one of the toughest ones. There's also one Meneltra you can't shoot, and you need to use other weapons. Blow up six Meneltra, and, mission accomplished!

This is standard parser stuff, but it gives a good look-in to the universe. It's worth playing without the timer, then with it, to feel like you really understand what's going in.

The timed test is a bit confusing from a plot perspective: if you've split up, shouldn't the maximum time taken be what matters, not the total moves? Mike Erlin seems like a man of action and not one to stand around, but when you switch perspectives, the turn count goes up, and that's that. Still, it's a pretty tidy timing puzzle all told.

Still, I wound up coming back to this after ParserComp to play it again, because I appreciated it, and I hoped it would bring me closer to really appreciating the author's other works. So often I've spun out on them earlier, wondering if I should have tried harder to fight with the ADRIFT runner, and such. I've had such fun with short ADRIFT games in the past, and I feel sad I can't tackle bigger ones. Bug Hunt on Menelaus is a good place to start, though, it seems. It leaves me wanting to understand more about how the characters interact (they're all sent separate ways from the center.) It leaves me feeling I can tackle such a game, and all the non-obvious verbs can be quickly found. I'd like more of that!

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Paint!!!, by David Whyld

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Madcap humor, worth poking through if nothing else, September 11, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

There are some jokes which are Not Your Thing but still give you a chuckle. David Whyld's games are like that for me. I prefer my humor with different misdirections. The humor in Paint!!! is, well, direct. You have three assistant painters who help you paint the office of a man with a very, very long Greek name. And you need to paint everything: the floor, the table, and so forth. But there are problems, like Thor appearing, and how your assistant Ted keeps stealing stuff. And the people who have kidnapped your sister, even though you don't have a sister. And the secretary who keeps bringing you refreshments you don't quite need.

This needs to be played through honestly several times before you have a clue what's really going on. But it's rather fun to muddle about. I wound up giving up, but fortunately, the game has a command called LET ME CHEAT. I did.

I am pretty sure Paint!!! violates all sorts of principles of game design theory. Nevertheless, I'm glad it popped up on recommended lists, and I was able to give it a try. It would probably be very frustrating without the walkthrough. It's a change of pace we need in small doses, when our subtle humor gets too subtle and doesn't seem to go anywhere.

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The Real Me (Neo-Twiny Jam 2023), by Ashes_and_Sand
Quick reflections on being oneself, September 11, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

The author wrote two vignettes for Neo Twiny Jam, and although A Crown of Ash was a more evocative title, The Real Me lasted with me a bit longer. It's a story of a fairy who's a trans man, but it cuts a bit more about that, to the general "being a bit different and people know it" to having even people who think they understand failing to understand. They see you as part of a block. This happens with any sort of nonconformism e.g. "I really respect nerds' work ethic. But maybe I could use their brains better!"

Having a fairy as the main character was interesting for me because, well, isn't it cool enough to be a fairy and have magic powers? You should be grateful for that. But of course that's not the whole story. The whole story can't and shouldn't be told in 500 words. But enough is captured of the whole "can you be less weird, please?" sentiment that rapidly spills over into scorn, or imagined scorn that nobody every really tried to curb, that the piece was successful for me.

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Molesworth, by Ian Aldridge

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Save the world, but not from the Mekon, September 10, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

On reading that there was a text adventure called Molesworth I held out high hopes that it was about Nigel Molesworth, hero of Geoffrey Willans's The Compleet Molesworth. If you haven't read it, you should. In it, Nigel chronicles the horrible happenings at St. Custard's, his primary school and dreams of defeating the Mekon.

Here, though, it's a different story. In this game written in Quill, you're looking to disable a nuclear missile at Molesworth RAF. It's a long, wandering game, and it has its own retro charm, but all the same there are so many ways to get lost or killed or trapped with no way to win. There are plenty of rooms with no exit, where you're just dumped. Often the game tells you a joke in the process, but that's not quite enough. Also, you get randomly hungry, and if you haven't found the sandwiches yet, it insults you with "You should've listened to me." This is much funnier when you have a walkthrough handy.

And certainly many of the puzzles are arbitrary! There's a maze that's clued by a newspaper article, but I can't figure how. There's a pub where you trade a CAMRA pamphlet for a pair of wire cutters, and another one that won't let you in if you're wearing a CND badge. (I'd not have known what these had meant if I'd played when the game came out. Thanks, acronymfinder.com!) There's limited inventory and red herrings. Some are king of funny, like the French onions in the Peugeot. The best clues are that you get 5% more for finding certain items, so you know they must be useful!

I'm snarking on the mechanics, many of which are about odd item trades, but there are neat parts, where you need to wear disguises so the military base personnel don't wise up to you. With the limitations of the ZX Spectrum, too, there's only so much to be done. But the game does have a lot of filler rooms, and X is not a shortcut for EXAMINE, PAPER is separate from NEWSPAPER, and so forth. (At least you only need four letters per word.) There are plenty of instadeaths, including at the start when your car is low on petrol. And the narrative voice does mock you a bit for not picking up on some very thin hints.

That said, Molesworth has an innocent earnest retro charm, even though it violates the not-yet-created Player's Bill of Rights and you must do ridiculous things like pole-vault across a stream. It's hard not to laugh at the pronouncement at the end where THIS IS YOUR BIG CHANCE, DON'T BLOW IT. I sort of wanted to see what happened if I did, but I was having trouble with save states on the ZX Spectrum, so I was too much of a weedy wet to try.

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Solarium, by Anya Johanna DeNiro

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Nuclear holocaust with a side dose of spiritualism, September 10, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2013

Solarium struck me as immediately technically impressive when I saw it rolled out in IFComp. It presents itself as a sort of alchemy game, superficially: you have one element, and it's listed at the bottom, and you have a bunch of paths to choose. Technically, you just click through all the paths, and you amass ingredients until you have everything, though some passages are dead ends until you have certain ingredients. Text is color-coded. Simple and effective, with no multimedia. And as you find ingredients, the backstory fills in.

It's not some fantasy with wizards and mythical beasts. It's about the Cold War, and what might have happened with just a bit of supernatural nudging. Someone claims that, hey, we can use nuclear missiles without retribution from the Soviets if nothing happens! Because Communism's bad, right? And people get killed, but it's not as bad as the alternative! You, as part of a fictionalized version of President Eisenhower's Solarium project, are one of two dissenters in a 3-2 vote to launch the plan. The person who breaks the tie says "What the heck, let's bomb 'em." You-the-player learn quickly that your alchemical quest is about locating the other dissenter, with whom you felt a close spiritual bond, to gain closure.

So bombing occurs. It's rather more large-scale than the pre-emptive strike on Iraq, and the enemy is better equipped to counter. But things seem great at first, and there's one scene that reminded me of the picnics people had watching the first few Civil War battles, except in 1860, bystanders weren't going to get harmed. There's another scene where the entity who sold the nuclear attack has possessed the President himself, and you and your mate kill him. It's not even the grisliest.

All this is in service of relocating your friend, but more, who tried to stop the bombing. You both go in and out of bodies, only you do not have the same control over it that the archon (who possessed the President) did. But perhaps the right spell can bring them back one last time. You wrestle with whether you deserve to exist, and if so, how you can go about fixing things.

On rereading Solarium years later, I realize there's a lot of stuff I missed the first time through, but I still got a lot from it. There's a discussion of the overthrow of Iran's socialist regime, which of course had and still has its own side effects. The fervor and religious corruption are still strong. We've seen that you don't even need supernatural powers to manipulate large segments of a population. Simple slogans do the task. And if there is no archon to possess people, we've seen people sell their souls and dignity for power and attention, quickly leaving behind the people they suckered into voting a certain way. And we're not going to use nuclear missiles--but we have plenty of snake-oil salesmen saying that what we do to the environment can't really matter, right?

Solarium has two endings, and they both revolve around ultimate but painful recovery, one for the world, and one in your relationship. They're worth both checking, but I remember the ominous feeling as I clicked the back button (it's in TiddlyWiki format instead of standard Twine)--what if this wipes out my progress? And, of course, it can't change the holocaust that happened. It also establishes it's importance, without seeming to nod menacingly at you or tug on your sleeve to say, you know, you really should find me important or relevant. It has a self-assurance that's rare even among high-placing IFComp entries.

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King Arthur's Night Out, by Mikko Vuorinen
In which Arthur does not channel Sir Galahad, September 10, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Mikko Vuorinen's The Adventures of the President of the United States was about a president who just got bored of the responsibilities having power and went globe-trotting. I'd played it first and was amused to see King Arthur's Night Out which seemed to address similar things. The main difference is, the game itself doesn't make it out of the castle.

Guinivere, his wife (warning: I'm guessing this is a translation thing, but X QUEEN made me cringe), doesn't want him hanging around with "Lance and the boys." (Sir Lancelot, of course.) She is watching to make sure he doesn't go anywhere. But he has a plan to sneak out--or, rather, you do. You'll find one gauntlet, and then it's obvious you need to find another. You also have secret crannies where you hide gadgets from Guinivere. But what, ultimately, for?

This is all minorly silly and perfectly harmless. Arthur is shown to be a bit of a booby as he looks for a way to distract Guinivere. The puzzles are probably things you've seen before. Arthur's method of escape, though it's been done before, probably hasn't been done by a king.

The command above aside, KANO gave me a few good laughs. It's competently enough executed but never really fully soars. Nevertheless it's a nice distraction if you want to play something Arthurian but don't have the time and energy for an epic. I played it in my head a couple times after getting through it. As text adventures go, it's comfort food.

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The Chasing, by Anssi Räisänen
Show hidden virtues, find hidden horses, September 10, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

The Chasing is remarkably low-key for a game with such a title--there's no way to lose the chase! And it's unusual without being weird. Sure, it has a few anachronisms, and a few of the horses you track down have odd names (Unhesitancy--it seems like an awkward English translation) but it finds a niche. It's well above a simple first work but shunned by people who want to make complex things. Not that either of those choices should be looked down on. But sometimes we jump from the first to "let's make something complex" and leave holes to be filled in.

The Chasing fills one of those holes in for me. It's a very welcoming game, like Anssi's others, both in the setting (you track down your horses who have run all over the valley, and you also visit fellow adventurers to give them invitations to a party) and in the non-crushing level of difficulty. The horses are all hidden, and you-the-player don't know their names. They're only revealed when you find them (the horses are all hidden--perhaps to avoid implementing them,) and they're named after various virtues you exhibit to remove the obstacle that was scaring them, or you, from doing what you want. Patience is found after waiting several turns in the right place. Courage is found after visiting a potentially high-risk area. And so forth.

It's a tough one for me whether the player should know their names beforehand--I kind of enjoyed the reveal, but on the other hand, it would be nice to have a general impression of which horses are still out there, and the horse names don't spoil anything. Perhaps an option to reveal this would be nice, although the puzzles aren't exactly crushing or unfair in any case. Sometimes people directly ask for help, and other times, it's a matter of noting what's in the description. Another puzzle rejects the right verb, saying, not now.

I think there's an art to gaining people's attention without holding it hostage, in conversation or in gaming, and Anssi Räisänen's games always do that. We only have so much attention to hand out each day. It may be a weakness that you sort of have to take a relatively simple backstory at its face value (your horses somehow all fled at once) or NPCs often seem to be there more in support of a puzzle, only to chat a bit and leave once you solve it. This works well in the context of removing red herrings, and I'm a lot more okay with that than most people, but I can see how others might want the feel of sociability. For me it's good to have social stuff and text adventures in separate chambers.

I'm also struck by how there are relatively little good didactic text adventures. Of course, there is Trinity, which discusses morals and a world-shaking event, and A Mind Forever Voyaging, which discusses ethics on a macro scale. But there is so much to fill in, games that might not catch fire or have a mass audience or crush you with their impressiveness or profundity, but you feel better for having gone through them. I did so more than once with The Chasing, which I found on a "favorite ALAN games" list and quickly said, yes, it belonged there.

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World Builder, by Paul Lee
Memories of ClubFloyd, but more, September 9, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

From 2011 to 2012, I remember ClubFloyd being a very busy and welcoming place when I managed to visit. There were the Apollo games and the New Year's competitions and also replays of the very best IFComp games. I even entered something to a New Year's Speed-IF. Playing on ClubFloyd made it that much more fun.

World Builder was one of the games from the Hugo competition, and I forgot about it until years later. The Hugo games, by and large, angled for silly fun and jokes, which was welcoming, especially as I was still learning about game design, and I worried that the major parser programming languages were radically different. (Some let you do some things easier. But most cover the basic syntax.) You didn't have to have an overarching narrative or super puzzles to make an impression or provide entertainment. Also, the writing period for entries was about four days, so there wasn't going to be a lot of branching--perhaps it didn't help that one of the prompts was about world building, or something like it. Many of the entries had kind of big text dumps.

But World Builder tried for that narrative, where you were a Dr. Frankenstein type who created a sentient cyborg called Hugor. Hugor breaks free from your control, pulled into a vortex by an antagonist whose name is Minfor.

Given what Minfor anagrams to, it's clear bigger themes are at play, but I don't think it's "Inform vs Hugo, death match." It feels to me like Hugor may have real concerns of: can I offer anything Minfor doesn't? Should I try to offer everything it does? Why not just be subsumed into it? Anything I do, can't it do as well or better? So Hugor is fighting for identity, too. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it. At any rate, this is a real concern--what could a relatively new or unpopular/refurbished programming language bring to the parser game? World Builder left me with these thoughts, and it wasn't until years later with Adventuron that we discovered something--that less is more. Adventuron got rid of a grammar-style parser and went with two words and will comfortably escapt Minfor's maw.

There aren't any real puzzles, but I enjoyed the drama and misdirection near the end, where it looks like everything is going to fail, but it doesn't. And jogging through again, the descriptions are strong, the dialogue maybe less so, but enough to give us sympathy for AIs who maybe see things we don't. And if Hugo were sentient, perhaps it would feel inferior to Inform just on the basis of games written in it? Perhaps ripped off it hadn't got a fair shake?

Looking back I wasn't sure if it was the camaraderie of being able to play along, or not having to concentrate on every move yet be able to catch up, that left me with good memories. That was surely part of it. But on replay I forgot how World Builder got me to think of bigger issues, and perhaps it was what stirred me to get the idea for my 2012 IFComp game, one which relied on Inform being Inform to build a world all about anagrams. That's certainly a "enough of my thoughts, what about my deeds" way to look at someone else's creative work, but it made me take a step back then, and now.

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Zyll, by Marshal Linder and Scott Edwards (IBM)

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Not quite ex-Zyll-erating, September 9, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

When I wrote guides at GameFAQs, I had this silly goal of writing one guide for each letter. Z was always going to be a toughie. I'd seen other Z games I liked (Hi, Zork,) but they had guides. But there was another four-letter game starting with Z that gradually pulled me over. But its map was huge! I got killed a lot! And the controls? Weird! I was used to parser games when everything was text. Zyll uses the F-keys, maybe being written in DOS. It all takes a bit of getting used to. Between that and the pauses as you walk between each room, I wound up putting Zyll off for a while. There were other Infocom text adventures to look through, and so forth.

Zyll's both very basic and very odd to me. It combines simple RPG and text adventure elements and does its own thing well without going breaking ground into either genre it flirts with. Modern players who pull this game down may find the most memorable feature to be the way the game makes them wait unnecessarily, but if there's someone else to play it with, whether cooperatively or in competition, it can be very entertaining. It's decidedly as ancient as its environs now, although at the time it was groundbreaking for its controls, the timed wait between rooms, and also for being on an IBM PC. Some of the ground wasn't worth breaking--to move, you push F1, then F2-8 for compass directions, F1 for up, and F7 for down. F10 works through minor commands like throwing or reading things. Fortunately all this is in a menu with ten items, and once you gain the spatial recognition to say, okay, F5 and F6 are in the third row and so forth, the awkwardness dissolves. It took me a few playthroughs, and it does take fewer keystrokes than typing. Zyll isn't as big on room or item descriptions as your average Infocom game, so you don't need to EXAMINE or whatever, and the only NPCs out there are for combat. Or fleeing. It's very mechanical.

And it's built so two people can share the keyboard to play competitively or cooperatively. Player 2 uses the numpad. This has its own traps, as 7 maps to F1, 8 to F2, and so forth. The rows don't quite line up. It feels like it should work somehow, but it doesn't. Zyll does its darndest to, though, highlighting commands you can use in green text. Maybe if there were more Zyll-likes, it would be more intuitive.

However, it's big enough so that walking around is intuitive well before the first time you get through. I spent quite a while writing out rough maps, wandering around as a Thief, whose main virtue was being able to flee. It turns out thieves are best by far for getting through Zyll, because combat is complex. I always meant to play as a warrior or wizard later, but I never did. Wizards have all sorts of neat spells which seem cool in theory, but being lazy, I didn't want one more command to remember. I was just glad to be able to bring the Orb of Zyll back to the Orb Room which, when you find three of the five big treasures, wins you the game. The Orb is super-heavy, so you can't carry any other items.

And that sort of makes thieves the dominant class--you can flee from anything, and if you're careful, you can pick off one item at a time. Slowly you tick off rooms that don't have them. But how many rooms are there? A lot! It took several play-throughs for me to discover ... yes, THAT room links THERE. Oh, I see how these rooms connect. It was a great a-ha moment for me when two big areas connected, something one wouldn't see in Infocom games, which tried to be economical with rooms and disk spaces. Zyll certainly isn't as vivid as a Zork. But it has all the elements of a fantasy adventure, without having to create a character party or deal with combats. There are boats for navigating underground caverns and random teleports, too, which play a certain role in two-player games. I had fun rolling the dice with them when still mapping out the full world.

Nonetheless the big drag for me was how you couldn't switch off the delay walking between rooms. In such a big game as Zyll, it added up, even when I cranked the DosBox speed up. (The timer is set to the system time.) It seems like there should be a secret code once you solve things, at least for single-player mode. After a few tries, I honed my strategy enough that I was able to win fairly quickly, maybe not getting all the treasures as a thief but enough to win. Zyll really only tracks points, but after a while, I didn't worry about maximizing that.

Zyll is an odd game, and I haven't found another like it, which is a shame, even if it's technical and dry. It develops a big expansive world, but by the time you're comfortable in it, and you know the rooms where the potions may randomly start, the delays are a bit tiring. It doesn't necessarily deserve immortality, but the process of discovery for me was quite fun. Just seeing a different layout of keys, from an age when one-key commands were random (remember Z for ZTATS in Ultima?) has a certain amount of appeal, and guess-the-verb is not a thing. However, the challenge and reward-for-time topped out quickly once I figured how to win as a thief. Warriors or Wizards just seemed too finicky. Nevertheless, I'm glad I pushed through to write a guide for it years ago, even if there is a better one now at CASA.

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Danger Mouse in the Black Forest Chateau, by Brian Belson, Edgar Belka, Kevin Buckner

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
"Jolly Good Show, DM." / "Actually, Colonel, it's a jolly good computer game.", September 9, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Danger Mouse was, and still is, a wonderfully spontaneous cartoon that can be appreciated by kids and adults alike. I always hoped one day to see all the episodes when I saw him on Nickelodeon, and it took a while. In the meantime I discovered this game and also a DVD of all the Bananaman episodes--Bananaman came on after Dangermouse, see. Dangermouse is not perfect and goes off on tangents, thus making it perfect for crazy text adventures written on 140K drives. Because if the authors get low on space, a deus ex machina will actually work! It wouldn't be true to the series if there wasn't one.

And even with many of the main elements of the show are left out(no escape of your oft-winged car from under the pillar box where DM lives and no Stiletto, Baron Greenbacks's right hand crow) it's a great example of what people managed to do back when they had to make do with very little memory. It even retains the sarcastic narrative voice in its room descriptions. One can almost picture Danger Mouse tapping his foot, waiting for the next part to load on the Commodore or whatever. (Still, thank goodness for emulator warp speeds!)

At the game's start, Colonel K calls in, and after bumbling over a few words, directs DM to find some terribly destructive weapon called a pi-beam hidden deep in the Black Forest Chateau. The beam is actually hidden in something else (hint: the show was always pun-heavy.) The game focuses on brief narrations to tell you what's going on, and it's choice- instead of parser-based. This saves memory for some neat little doodles floating about the screen giving a rough picture of what's going on. Good choice--Danger Mouse with a parser would be the wrong sort of sophistication.

You will get an extra option if you bring the right item to the right place such as a key to a room with a locked door, which drops the difficulty, which back in the days of slow loading times was a good thing. Solutions stick out like the sort of levers Penfold trips over to spring a trap. Making the wrong choice may provide useless entertainment but never kills you. It just knocks you back to a location that is not so far along in your quest. You'll also find some locations containing several items, of which you can only have one at a time. Here's the only weakness of the choice-based format: there's no inventory option. Usually you'll need two or three such items in a certain order and although you can sweep through all locations with every item pretty easily, the items' uses are relatively sensible even if the situations where you must use them are random as you'd expect.

Danger Mouse, alas, has no saved games. Not a huge problem in this day of emulator save states, but a hassle back them. Halfway through you're given a code number to access the second part. Fortunately these load times are the only really slow parts of the game, and the rest of the time you'll be occupied between finding the one-way access routes between important locations and working your way through some minor-nuisance mazes. The drawings along the way will keep you entertained. There's not a ton of color, but Penfold's iconic too-tight suit jacket shows(too bad the tie isn't in full splendor too,) and Danger Mouse finds many ways to look nonplussed. There are even cameos from Count Duckula and Baron Greenbacks. But a good deal of the scenery is recycled, which is not all a bad thing, because the show occasionally made fun of itself for the repeated backgrounds, and besides the Commodore had limited memory and disk space. The game gets a few of them and doesn't abuse them. Too much. There's also a motif of moving in even wider circles as the game goes on, which works well enough for such an absurdist cartoon. DM himself would frequently run into an obstacle or enemy several times before finding the right way through.

Danger Mouse, the show, worked well because it had many silly pictures to go with puns children might not understand. The game works much in the same way with quips as "the lone shark takes a great deal of interest" or the red herring you find, which by now feels overdone, but it deserves credit back in the 80s. DM and Penfold also stumble through the requisite trap doors and secret passageways with the help of goofy gadgets or common items used for extraordinary purposes, and so for a game with such simple controls (maximum five choices on any screen,) the clever narration and pluck make it a credit to the cartoon show that inspired it. Yes, a full-fledged Infocom-style adventure would have been ideal, and Danger Mouse in general seems to cry out for multiple point-and-click remakes, replete with a Bananaman sub-game for people who'd saved the world with Danger Mouse would have been a big hit. But I really can't complain. It was fun before I managed to get those Danger Mouse DVDs cheap on eBay and after.

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Tough Beans, by Sara Dee
"my lousy job, apartment, *and* relationship" ... is not lousy, September 9, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

While I enjoyed the author's work Mite enough to wonder about her other works, the name Tough Beans made me cringe. It's not offensive or anything, of course. It's just, who says a phrase like that? Even ironically? It doesn't work! I remember someone in my college dorm who said Cool Beans, which was close enough to the borderline. (He also missed the point of Joe Pesci's "you think I'm funny?" rant in Goodfellas.) But eventually curiosity got the best of me. I didn't find out what the name meant for a while. It turns out it's the name of a coffee shop, the sort everyone goes to but nobody really admits they go to. It's there that the main drama takes place.

You start off late for work, at a job your father got for you, well sort of (he'd hoped to do better.) You've always felt a bit spoiled, and yet your family hasn't encouraged you into a career that really soars. You also have evidence your boyfriend Derek's been cheating on you, and there's also the matter of your dog having his jaws around one of your pairs of heels. So this feels like a "my bad job" sort of game, especially with your boss, Soren Pickleby, being--well, a real turnip. He's asked you to do some relatively simple stuff, but one quickly suspects he would enjoy saying "It's simple stuff, what's wrong with you?" more than actually having it done quickly. Oh, there's low-grade sexual harassment in there, too.

One of the things you must do, and do it now, is an errand to get coffee at Tough Beans, where you run into your cheating boyfriend Derek and the coworker who was supposed to help you sign off on one paper. The hijinks start piling up there--there's a vagrant who wants a cigarette, and there's a hipster with a cigarette behind their ear, and it's pretty clear what to do, there. (With appropriate "gee, does this guy really need a cigarette?" reflection.)

There's a certain amount of reflection throughout the game as to how you met Derek, what impressed you about him, why you're still together, and so forth, and he's revealed to be a bit of a slimeball. You go through a lot of denial about Derek's cheating, and there are endings where you realize it's over, and you don't. You do, however, have a moment of reckoning with your boss.

The puzzles (there are "do what your boss says" things which develop your character nicely but aren't really puzzle) aren't too tough. They can be solved nonviolently, but when you get to the end of the game, you may only have half of the full points. How you miss the points was interesting to me--the game doesn't display "your score went up by one point," and so I missed that calling the right person at the start got you a point. Which makes sense. We generally don't think of life in terms of scoring points. But the general idea with points is, there's standing up for yourself, and there's REALLY standing up for yourself and finding ways to. I enjoyed the mechanic, even if I didn't stand up for myself very well. And then there are the amusing actions that don't get points, like smacking Derek, who deserves it. You have a chance to destroy his car, which the game rejects, but it's fun to try. This sort of thing makes Tough Beans replayable, as you'll probably miss things, but on the other hand, you may argue you don't need to stand up for yourself perfectly, and looking back too much on that gets in the way if the next good experience.

There was a lot of light-hearted humor through Tough Beans underscoring your inability to stick up for yourself. This went beyond "poor me, the world is against me," and even though its main character was a completely different demographic from me, certain things resonated. It's an interesting meshing of "my lousy job/apartment/relationship" and does so without drowning in self-pity or hopelessness.

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Life of Puck, by alyshkalia

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
For those of us who'd never want a rat as a pet, September 9, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

Neo Twiny Jam was a good time to explore and try things quickly, without going into the weeds. And many authors did, often exploring different themes of identity when submitting more than one entry, or trying for different forms of drama.

But Life of Puck and What They Don't Know, may be the pair of entries by the same author that differs most. It's a tribute to the author's pet rat. Rats, like most pets, don't have too much to do, and the author mentions they wrote this to figure out Twine.

It seems like an excellent choice of a self-tutorial, and technically it covers all the bases. Presentation isn't something I generally care much about, but the soft colors and fonts give a homey feel and add to the fun. It reminded me of an idea I had for a Twine game, about two cats I had. (Maybe next year for Neo Twiny Jam.) I'm sure someone else has a dog story. I hope they share it, to help us through the more serious entries.

There are five total endings, though they're not endings in the normal sense. You just have a new day. There are just moments when you've realized you've exhausted one action more or less, and you don't find that there are five until you choose the "take a break" option. I'd found three by the time I had, and at that point, I was able to remember what I hadn't really tried.

You get no special alert when you hit all five, but then again, pet rats aren't particularly goal-oriented. And it doesn't really feel like lawnmowering, just exploring. Also, looping over the same options several times with the same text doesn't feel repetitive, because rats generally don't worry about that sort of thing (okay. They can memorize their ways through a maze. But that's different.)

I'd feel kind of worried if even a pet rat got loose. But here it's a nice game without any real stress. You get out of the cage that is your daily routine as a human, find the five endings, and go back in that cage yourself once you've had an adventure, so to speak.

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The Hunting Lodge, by Hulk Handsome
Lodge hunts you, sort of, September 9, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: EctoComp 2012

The Hunting Lodge was a shocking shift from the author's IFComp 2012 entry In a Manor of Speaking, submitted for EctoComp one month after. Both have unexpected deaths. This has fewer jokes--though they're there, in the descriptions, if you look. The author himself mentioned, when he re-released the game, that his post-comp fixes included some jokes, because he couldn't help himself. I think the changes are for the better.

The author describes it as partially influenced by Hunt the Wumpus, and it is, only the map is slightly imbalanced, and there are fewer rooms. You wouldn't know this at first, as you're driven to a barren hunting lodge where you haven't heard anything from your brother for a while. Then there's a moment when you know you're in trouble, because of something you did, which is rather good. Then the chase starts. There is a way to defeat the monster and exit.

The strategy here is tricky. The monster's roaring is louder the closer it gets, so you need to, whenever possible, avoid rooms with two exits. But of course one of the things you need is in such a room, and you must visit a dead end as well. So there's a chance you'll just get killed by the monster, and that's luck. But it adds to the fear, which makes it a good EctoComp entry. There's also a timed bit at the end, and you may be helplessly trapped by the monster as time runs out. More scary fun.

Given the author, I was sort of expecting a mounted moose head that gave you a raspberry or wet willy when you weren’t looking, or perhaps a Big Mouth Billy Bass gone bad. There is humor there (a note that breaks the fourth wall explains the rules) and some subtler hat-tips to authors the writer likes, but the main plot is dead serious. It's easy to forget those jokes.

Post-comp I think the author did a good job of fixing bugs and balancing gameplay. It's a quick tense effective experience. We should all try divergences like this from our main style. I know I haven't, and I'd like to.

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metastasis, by Playahead Games

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
No confetti or surprise party awaits., September 9, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

metastasis shows that retro or bare-bones feel, a fixed-width font as you describe things clinically, the cursor slowly moving left to right, dispersing scientific information. You're obviously in the sort of laboratory where emoticons are frowned on.

And once you see the choices available, well, there is nothing to smile at--if you read the first passage carefully, you'll note something disturbing at the end. The choices belie the sterility of the lab setting. Riots are mentioned. There's shelter for the lab.

COVID was "inspiration" for a lot of Twine efforts, most of which deal with social isolation head-on. It's a bit more subtle here, in the lab, trying things out, maybe making some progress. You hope. There are four endings, none directly stating what happens, with some easier to figure out than otheres. A couple, I had to repeat to fully get it, and they made more sense once I saw all four. There are not that many choices to make. I slowly pieced things together. Once I did, I realized maybe I could have guessed fully, from the title and the blurb. But watching things unfold would still have been effective.

Not that everything could unfold, with only 500 words to work with for Neo Twiny Jam. A lot of details are left unexplored, but that actually makes the horror greater. Sort of like how COVID was even scarier when we didn't know what it was about, and while we read about mutations and how it lingers, there's a feeling of "oh no I better not go out so much," but we aren't blindsided. Still, three years on, we feel lucky this didn't happen, and we remember it as a real possibility.

Further credit to the author for allowing us to press the space button to bypass the typed-text-on-screen effect, so we could experience the remaining paths at our own speed.

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Bored of the Rings, by Fergus McNeill
Not high art, despite chunks of drug humor, September 8, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

The Commodore 64 text adventure Bored of the Rings (BotR) is an offshoot of Harvard Lampoon's great satire book of the same name. It includes most of the characters that go along with Frito but also manages to find goofy new names for each one of them. Frito's actually Fordo, for instance. The game even divides itself into three parts(passwords needed for the second two) and only marginally copies gags from the book. It does pretty well with the new sort of adventure; much of the game consists of picking up companions Traveling Ever Eastward before destroying the ring as in the trilogy. A serious game such as this, too devoted to the original material, would have been very dull. BotR, despite being a copy of a satire, manages to poke fun at its own genre and provide enough gratuitous stupidity and vulgarity to be memorable. Plus it doesn't take several whole days to finish unless you manage to get on the parser's bad side (it's a simple brute!)

Delta 4 Software cranked out a few goofy text adventures where it ignored words of longer than five letters and never was perfectly clear on what you had to type; as a whole they were worth it, but each game gives individual frustrations. In BotR, the worst is when you must GO LIFT and not ENTER LIFT. This non-satirical obtuseness, thankfully, is not pervasive.

You generally get points for clever actions and never just taking something or visiting a new room, and there are even optional puzzles, some involving guns. Something from Narnia will help in one of these. But the most challenging part of the game besides the puzzles and finding the right verbs (you must DESCEND TUNNEL and not enter it) is when you have silly locations that look like each other and need to navigate them. You can tell you've reached a new one when a new narrow picture pops up at the top.) The trial and error seems slightly pointless and is forgivable only because Fordo, your character, was established as a dupe early on by Grandalf and his uncle Bimbo.

There are shockingly few items to start out besides the hallucinatory beans from Tim Bumbadil, with emphasis on stumbling around bars successfully. You'll never have more than three items you can use at a juncture in such a linear game, and so it would be easy without the challenge of raking your mind for common verbs that have slipped your mind. Later on you'll find a swamp where the game doesn't bother to give you directions, and paths fork a bit. It's entirely possible you'll miss a direction to go from a location as well since the screen clears once you move away. There are also locations you'll run into and no matter what you do the next few moves your fate is sealed.

So the game's challenges are dominated by arbitrary concerns, but it gets the sort of things right that can help any piece of good satire stand out. The game is pretentious when you adjust your inventory and even invokes ancient prophecy to force you to sit through uncle Bimbo's party at the beginning, and all the people names and most of the player names work well. Aragorn's foil constantly discusses his family tree (more dialog would have been awesome) and is silenced by grumpy companions such as Legoland and Spam on the way to places like Isithard and Almanak. The events when you solve anything involve slapstick physical comedy and amusingly grave injustice, and you have all manner of degenerate forest spirits to creep you out and even break-dance, as well as a secret passage which doesn't help you one bit, and a signpost saying "Last Bridge 4 turns." You even get cool ways to die, which have the best pictures. And although the anti-computer jibes are the weakest (the ring you must destroy represents corporate computer interests,) the computer prison where people are forced to write budgeting software is a winner. Minor characters get unfair punishment, too, and the meeting with the Balhog is certainly not sappy.

Outside Infocom, BotR is really one of the better early ones I've uncovered. It would be disappointing if the game were fully faithful to either LotR or BotR, the books. It does well to drop in anachronisms instead of BotR (the book)'s fourth-wall deus ex machinas throughout. And given how early it is in the history of text adventures, and how badly other attempts I've seen fail, BotR does commendably well satirizing them. Yes, it's very on-the-nose and clearly below Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where the puzzles really made you laugh and think. But I still snicker at the final command to destroy the ring. If you don't have the time to play, read a walkthrough, and that'll give enough laughs.

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Grue., by Charles Mangin
So that's how the other side feels!, September 8, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2017

You actually didn't kill too many grues in the Zork games. Maybe none. You just shone a light on them, and they scattered. Here, you are a hungry grue, tracking down adventurers before you starve. There's no standard map to this game. You need to use your senses. It's a timed game, as you starve if you wait too long, both overall and at the final conflict. But there is also nothing wild to do, or any intricate puzzle.

Sight is not one of them, of course. You start with your eyes closed, in your layer, and if you open your eyes, you lose your other senses: taste, feel, smell and hearing. All four of these are used as you stumble through caverns. There's some trial and error here, but the main thing is, if you use certain commands twice, the adventurer is alerted to your presence. They may flee or outright kill you.

It's a sparsely described game, with a tense if quick hunt. At the end, you corner the adventure, and this is where I hit a wall. Some deaths were expected--you didn't prep yourself enough, or you used the same sense twice. But the final one, I just assumed you used one verb first, and I kept trying to find ways to make it effective. (There is a preparatory verb. It makes sense.) I didn't think of skipping over a certain step. There's some cluing here, as the game asks you if you want to, before the adventurer kills you. If you manage to get to the point, though, you have a meal!

Grue is clearly well beyond Zork: a Troll's-Eye View in terms of realism and description and character development. It's fairly quick to go through. I suspect it slid down the rankings due to the guess-the-standard-verb frustration at the end, as well as some other things which seemed like beginner mistakes. However, I recognized the author's name from some Apple II programming groups, so he is no beginning programmer, and he was probably just blindesided by stuff he could fix easily once he knew about it. Inform can just be tricky that way. It's a good idea and worth playing, and it's quite surprising someone didn't do it sooner. It feels like it has some holes that could be fixed pretty quickly. But all the same, I'm very glad it's there. There are a lot of Zork tributes that rely on canon knowledge or are just another treasure hunt, and this is genuinely different.

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50 Shades of Jilting, by Rowan Lipkovits (as Lankly Lockers)
Wearying near the end, fun until then. Like the relationship!, September 7, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: ShuffleComp

Aisle clones have been done before, of course. I did one I'm glad I did, but I'm not going to show it to anyone as an example of my brilliance. They help the programmer explore, and they're perfect for game jams like ShuffleComp. Especially if the author draws 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover by Paul Simon.

In 50SL, you're in Tom's Diner (I got that reference!) with your lover, Sam. Soon to be your ex-lover. But what is the best way to leave?

The standard Inform commands fall quickly at first. Some two-word commands work, but all have a parallel one-word command. For instance, LOOK and X SAM do the same thing. Meta-commands work, too, in line with the "poke technically at stuff because this is a game jam" ethos. I had things fall in bunches as I realized what to do. One command forced me to hold down the space bar to see a few subsequent related commands.

This all was amusing until I realized that I had no way to track what I did. Also, the text was overwhelming after a bit. The jokes, for the most part, landed. And, also, I really enjoyed the reject responses if, say, you typed SCORE twice. They're much shorter and snappier. Brevity can be the soul of wit.

That said some of the verbs have to do with love or being dumped, and some are Zorkian in-jokes, and the final one may be a meta-command. I had to use a text dump to see the last few.

50SL does have a few rough edges, with one particular synonym missed as they hacked the parser. (Spoiler - click to show)Z is not a synonym for WAIT. But by and large, it hits the main commands. And I do enjoy the rejections for stuff I forgot I did. It's just that you'll probably leave the hard verbs for last, and that gets frustrating, to be so close. You don't really have any clues--perhaps alphabetical listing of what you got, with ?'s for what remains, would be useful. One word in particular ending in Y irked me, and there was another noun from Zork.

Nonetheless 50SL was memorable enough for me to poke at it years later. I was amused to see I'd already disassembled it during the ShuffleComp judging period, but there were still puzzles involved. I submitted a guide to CASA so you don't have to jump through all the hoops I did, and you can enjoy this game before it potentially exasperates you. In this case it's better to check the hints too soon than too late. It's a neat idea, and you might as well use resources to be able to walk away appreciating it the most you can.

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Frog, by MartynJBull

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
One way to keep under 500 words? Axe the dialogue!, September 7, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

Neo Twiny Jam inspired quite a few entries where protagonists interacted with pets, or where you were an animal. It's not hard to see why--you weren't going to get suckered by detail. It's excusable to use one word instead of a full sentence to describe what you want to do. Oh, and you probably get automatic "cute points." Even without the appealing cover art.

Frog feels like it doesn't rely on said "cute points," which is very good. It quite simply follows the progress of a frog from egg to maturity. There is confusion, and there are roadbumps. The ending was very nice, and you may say "oh, I've seen this before," but for me, it works. There are forces beyond your control that decide whether or not you make it to adulthood.

There are worries about forced charm in an entry like this once we see the picture. If there was any, which I doubt, I am glad I am suckered by it. It was all quite clean and fun and a reminder to be decent to those who are a bit confused.

This was a nice first effort and a reminder not to worry if something you want to write is maybe too light or silly a subject to work. It's yet another Neo Twiny Jam entry that might be trying too hard if it went over 500 words, but it sticks the landing at its current size.

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Impostor Syndrome, by Dietrich Squinkifer (Squinky)

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
These things happen, and we really can't just say "these things happen.", September 7, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2013

Reading this back in 2013, I felt this piece was a bit too rough or raw. But I couldn't put my finger on what I would do better. It feels too direct at some times, as if it doesn't give me room to breathe. Georgina feels like she is humblebragging to start out. Perhaps one may find her a cipher, or not likable enough, or whatever. But that may be part of the point. Targets of harassment are chosen because, well, they're putting themselves out there too much, or they're trying to hide from real judgment. They're acting too nice, or they're acting too brash. There's always something. So I think some melodrama can be the point, and whether or not we have a big or small win, there's always a worry that it's tripped up, or it's denigrated after the fact. And this is, indeed, not "all in our head." It's placed there by people who tell us we need to listen carefully to what they say, but all the same, their one offhand comment? Blowing off steam. As if you need to pay dues for basic human respect. That Georgina does not get it, both from clear louts and more sophisticated-seeming types, is the crux of Impostor Syndrome.

Because people can, indeed, be awful in many different ways. The place where Georgina feels the worst is a Ted-Talk style speech. There's a lot of anxiety. She aces the first slide, which has her name and experience. Everything else seems to be going okay, even as she remembers small things that went wrong with her process, nitpicks her boss found. Perhaps she should not even be here? Part of a minority quota? Ignoring, of course, the roadblocks that pop up for being a minority.

What strikes me about the dramatic moment is how crude and cruel it is, and how it is done by people surely nowhere near as smart as Georgina. She knows it's better not to look, and she knows it's not original, and she knows it's something she should be able to deflect, because it's been done before. She also knows it's aesthetically wrong. And we do, too, and it's not "freedom of speech" or anything like that, that people can do this with impunity. It's as if there's an unsaid voice saying "seen it before? You should deal with it. Not seen it before? Well, be lucky you haven't until now." (There's a parallel to "You never really listened to Trump" and "Trump lives rent-free in your head" taunts.)

Another thing that hit me--the same guys who micromanaged Georgina noting small things she did wrong (they probably let you know they don't suffer idiocy) do let the big stuff slip through at a talk she put effort into. It's a logical inconsistency and worse. I could picture them, after the presentation, say "Yeah, they were out of line, but you could respond better." Or suddenly forgetting talks they made about taking the initiative to build a positive culture, or whatever.

And Georgina has a chance to, near the end, to dare to get out of her lane and talk about non-technical stuff, but then she's worked so hard to focus and not waste people's time. This is the main choice in IS: you can skip it, or you can have a link-maze. If people are too critical of the aesthetics of a Twine link-maze, they are missing the big picture, but it is a relatively weak point. (I saved, but I still guessed the top five words most likely to do something, then looked at the source. It feels like link-mazes could have a way to be navigable, and I've seen Twine tricks where URLs turn into plain text, which I like a lot. Maybe that could happen here, blocking out similar words. But I sense I am turning into the same people who micromanaged Georgina.)

There are other things, too, placing harassment side-by-side with coworkers flat-out ignoring Georgina or uninviting her from important meetings and projects. Again, it's easy to imagine a voice saying "Oh, so you're mad when they bug you and mad when they don't. You seem to need things just so, don't you?" This is something I don't think I saw on the first reading, but it seems more natural now, and we really need more ways to bounce back quickly.

Working through IS I was reminded of a teacher or two who put me on the spot more than they should have. I think of how I was told others had it worse, just as Georgina was, and yet how I should be impressed by that teacher being so uncompromising! I'm older than they are now and have more access to information, so I can work through the past and know people who remind me of people like that are bad news. But they do seem to gain power.

Still, fight-back strategies are way more at our fingertips in 2023 and 2013. YouTube videos have discussions where even the most generic or overwrought descriptions of mistreatment bring people together. The techniques, short- and long-term, have lagged behind trolling techniques, because the second are much easier to develop. Looking back I'd be more interested in the small moments and victories and such--they are there in IS but intentionally muted.

The author said that this was intended to make people think, and I think it did, but it led me the wrong way at first. That's not malicious like the antagonists in the story leading Georgina the wrong way. But it is enough to say it is an opportunity missed. This should in no way preclude the author to keep fighting and tell stories that need to be told. It's been ten years. Sadly, there will have been more data to help hone said stories. But if we say IS is a bit too direct and the author has the talent to write something more powerful, one thing we can't credibly say any more is that the plot, or the narrator's feeling, are too exaggerated. It's not perfect, but it's very good it's there, as it addresses issues well beyond standard angst.

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Machine of Death, by Hulk Handsome

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
I wouldn't want to know. I think., September 7, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2013

We've all read a story about someone who was told how they were going to die, took steps to avoid it, and had it happen anyway. Or that someone they loved would die a certain way. Years ago Ryan North built on this to say, what if there was a machine that could tell anyone how they were going to die? It spawned a short-story collection I read and enjoyed. One I didn't find out about until I played Machine of Death. I don't remember any of the stories, but I remember MoD, maybe mostly because it was part of IFComp, and so naturally I read what others had to say about it, and I remembered details.

But I think MoD's interactivity allows us to remember certain things. Anyone who got a card from the machine would wonder about all the details and start what-iffing. It must feel awful to know the walls are closing in, and you aren't even near. So should you? Well, in MoD, you're hanging out near a machine, wondering just that. Or maybe you'll just engage in Deathspotting, a wonderfully evocative word MoD uses that I don't think I need to define. You even chat with someone who got a card. It all seems impossible, even in this enlightened day and age where we can evaluate risk factors for a certain sort of cancer or whatever. But the moral and emotional import is pretty clear. We'd change what we do and who we are. It would be on our mind. Knowledge would not bring power.

So yeah there's a way to sneak out of the mall and say "nope nope nope." You can still learn a lot in the process. You can waste your remaining $5 at a fast food restaurant that gives discounts to people with certain death cards. There's a story of a famous person who did well by embracing his cause of death and another who lied about theirs.

But what if you choose a card? Well, then, there are three scenarios. I don't want to spoil them, because they're quite different and worth seeing, and with something like your own cause of death, it's a surprise. The game lets you restart from the beginning of the death scenario, or you can go back to the machine, where you can loop to the next choice. It doesn't directly allow undos, which might feel artificial given the theme, but this feels about right, since we all do trace through the past and think "could I have done better" and sometimes even hope for verification we did as well as we seemed to.

Suffice it to say one is pedestrian, one is absurd, and one contains a corporate slogan of sorts that can mean anything. This variety allows MoD to poke at certain tropes or obvious considerations without beating on them too much. For instance, if you're in a normally life-threatening situation, you can be risky because, well, you can't die THAT way.

I found the absurdist one to be the least effective, though it gave me the most laughs on the surface. There's some celebrity doppelganger stuff in there, which only goes so far, and because the cause of death is so specific, you really do try to do everything you can to avoid it, which weirds some people out. But hey, it wouldn't be weird if they KNEW. Still, there are ways out.

The corporate slogan is a bit different--you have a boss at work who knows their cause of death, and they let you know "I know my cause of death and I'm not letting it stop me! So I don't want to hear any whining." It's like "there's no I in team," but far, far worse for underlings. One of the main dramas here is getting to work on time. The bad end is lampshaded quite effectively, but the good ending blindsided me a bit and yet still made sense. The author, of course, wrote a lot of stuff to just make people laugh, but I appreciated the twist here, after skewering awful corporate types, to take some sting out of them abusing a catch phrase.

The pedestrian scenario makes a few things obvious, but the thing is--you know you aren't going to die violently! At least you're pretty sure. So everything's okay, right? But then you have a chance to look at someone else's death card. There are some implications there of what you might have to do. But one neat bit is that if you think you can do or avoid something because you're invincible, you only sort of get away with it. You aren't told what state of mind you'll die in, and that's something you have control over, for better or worse, with certain drastic actions.

The author is good at stringing juvenile jokes together without being cruel, and here he's a bit more profound than in In a Manor of Speaking. I can't say which entry is better, but I appreciate them both a lot, and it's neat to see the author have two drastically different successes from one IFComp to the next. MoD contains a lot of deep thoughts and worries under the jokes. It'd be ideal if we didn't need that to explore serious matters, but we often do. Replaying MoD almost ten years after its original release, I felt relief I hadn't found any stupid ways to die. I remembered the ways I worried I might die, instilled by teachers or peers or whomever because I was too careless or conservative. But I do think MoD is one of those things that help you worry less about dying so that you can, you know, pack more life in. And the whole concept of the Machine of Death turns out to have been prescient--ten years ago, we knew that machines knew a lot about you, but with political campaigns and so forth, knowledge of microtargeting and such has expanded to where it seems like machines can figure everything except how we're going to die. MoD lets us join in the fight against that sort of fatalism, or at least imagine how to, which would be worthy even if it weren't well-written.

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A boat ride., by Unexpected_Dreams

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Ah, so THAT's what's REALLY funny about the whole situation..., September 7, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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the happiness jar, by cairirie

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
You can't bottle happiness, or can you?, September 7, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

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

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

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

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Yak Shaving for Kicks and Giggles!, by J. J. Guest

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Not a Ren and Stimpy tribute, but plenty absurd, September 6, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

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

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

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

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

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

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HOLY ROBOT EMPIRE, by Caleb Wilson (as Ralph Gide)
My favorite title from Shufflecomp 1, September 6, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: ShuffleComp

ALL CAPS titles usually raise my blood pressure slightly. The writing contained under them often tries too hard. I know what I'm supposed to feel, but I feel forced to, and that ruins the effect. It's like someone using too many meaningful pauses or voice inflections. Even if I get it, I may just want to pretend I don't get it out of spite. Yes, yes, you're very avant-garde, that's very nice.

But I quickly forgave HRE. It doesn't force anything on you, although it does lay things out so you can't miss some very clever jokes. The flip side is that you are probably so involved you missed a few. There's no shortage of games that poke religious fanaticism as well as those who poke the sterility of a robotic approach to the world, and HRE somehow pokes both without seeming like yet another South Park episode that needs to make sure it's tried to annoy everyone. I'm amused to say that, here in a dystopia where robot popes now control the levers of religious power, the solution to missing anything is to do a good old-fashioned text dump.

So who are you, and what's your goal? Well, Morgan Santemore, instructor in robot decorum at the Mathedral of the Heavenly Code High School. Oh, and a deputy Robot Inquisitor. And with Pope Fortran in town, your goal is to kiss his ring. Everyone wants to, though.

And as the absurdity quickly hits you, the puns and incogruence come flying. Of course, there is winning the game, but if you're like me, you'll want to know the words to the DOSology and Ave Machina. You'll groan at entering the crypt ("you have been encrypted!") or wonder if the 9 in Saint Number 9 means anything, or if the fuse from a saint is more a votive candle or piece of their heart. The puzzles are silly in their own way, too--the final one requires placing a brain in the Robot Pope's guardian, after which they gratefully let you by.

The puzzles, thankfully, require no great robotic calculation. They really do feel classic, the first point coming from more or less following instructions to process a student's test. While some might object to the hygiene and ethics in some of the puzzles, that can be hand-waved away by saying "well, you're a Deputy Inquisitor. You get to do what you want!" You wind up exchanging a lot of dollars with a hermit for a lot of items that seem useless. They give a full refund for slightly-used stuff. This may not make perfect sense, but it's worth a try. Perhaps the implication is that humans can be suckered around.

Oh, there's a chronological list of robot popes, too. It's well worth reading, as many of them are named after languages. Their rule started in 1 ARA (after Robot ascendancy? The mystery is interesting--perhaps we humans are meant to feel silly we can't figure it out) and it's one of those small shaggy dog stories where you don't have to understand the languages to get most of the laughs.

Amusingly, in this well-implemented game, one item that isn't described is a fiction paperback--and the joke works well. There's also a discussion with your supervisor about their job, which ... well, turns into a disturbing inquisition. We've all had power struggles at the office, or stuff we need to say to the boss to make them feel great, but this, oh man. There are a lot of these conversations, which are to the point about what to do (after all, robots don't care about frippery, and anyway you should be smart enough to figure it out, right?) but they do leave me feeling quite hopeless for the main character. This is the neat stuff on the side, besides the puzzles and jokes you must see to get through the game. So you may walk away worried you missed a bit.

HRE does feel intimidatingly smart, and it's very well put together. Coming back to it after a few years, I remembered it as being much bigger than it was. It uses big words like Narthex, which intimidated me (but when Cragne Manor came around years later, I was PREPARED.) It may intimidate you with just how smart it is. It certainly blew me away with "you'll love this or hate this" vibes early on, but after reading the descriptions in the first two rooms, I knew which side I was on. It's really extremely clever, and perhaps my main gripe with it is that I couldn't think of all the thematic puns and such. They populate the game, and they're what you'll notice most, but there's also an undercurrent of dissatisfaction and authoritarianism and idees fixes through the laughter. Sometimes that is the only way to approach such issues.

Oh, also, there are some Tom Swifties once you win, as a bonus.

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Friar Bacon's Secret, by Carl Muckenhoupt
Oh, man. What would Miles think of a full-fledged microwave? Or computer?, September 6, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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My Evil Twin, by Carl Muckenhoupt
"I look exactly like myself.", September 6, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

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

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

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

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

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

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Look Around the Corner, by Doug Orleans (as Robert Whitlock)

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
It's escape the room but actually there are 2 rooms, September 6, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: ShuffleComp

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

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

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

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

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

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Conduit of the Crypt, by Grim Baccaris

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
"Better luck next century." = better than any timed text., September 5, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Puddles on the Path, by Anssi Räisänen
It's the journey that matters. Are we on the same page?, September 5, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Spring Thing

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

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

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

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Moquette, by Alex Warren
People-watching and self-reflection on public transport, September 5, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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More, by Jason Dyer (as Erin Canterbury)

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A mattress landscape would've been too on-the-nose., September 5, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: ShuffleComp

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

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

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

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

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Dead Man's Party, by Royce Odle (as Morrissey)
A Pratchetty vignette about tying up details of an untimely death, September 5, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: ShuffleComp

DMP was the author's first full-length game (he had written two Speed-IFs before, one for Pax East 2010, where, if memory serves, the Infocom Implementors talked about their experiences in detail, figuring that was probably the best time to do so.) And I tested it, and while I usually don't review things I tested, this is different. First, nine years later, it has no reviews ... and second, I was looking forward to the author writing something new. They were longtime IFMud regulars, and like all regulars who just liked to play text adventures, they eventually considered stepping into writing one. Some went on to make it a habit.

I think IFMud must've had a testing exchange program, but however we got in contact, I enjoyed working slowly through more of the game. It's not a huge one, but there's enough in there that things can go wrong without testing, and they did. I bugged Royce a lot. I worried I bugged him too much. I worried I missed stuff. I hope I told him he wrote something well worth writing and playing. I certainly enjoyed it nine years later.

The title clues what DMP is about: namely, someone has died at a party. You've already done the whole dying thing. Maybe not at a party, but still, you're glad you got called in to be a junior Reaper. Hey, it beat sitting in a grave for all eternity! And this is your first solo trip. Nail it, and you may become a full reaper!

Now your character knows what to do to prepare, though you-the-player doesn't. This is handled by a checklist which mentions you have a gauntlet that makes most things easy. This is nice for the game but disturbing as to the actual ramifications--even low-level supernatural beings can change things at will if need be, and even if it doesn't change the world at large, there's a sense that death is extra inevitable.

Following instructions gets you most of what you need, but there's still the matter of the finicky scythe dispenser machine. It's not VERY hard to figure out, but it's enough of a puzzle. Then it's off to Mr. James Phillips's house. Poor chap just took a lightning bolt to the chest, and time's frozen there, but you can communicate with him. It seems like it should be in and out. Use your tools to put him in the spirit jar, and off you go! With everyone frozen in time as you do the honors, it seems there's not much to do.

But wait! James has two small last requests: put his ring and will out on the dresser, to make things easier for his wife. All spirits get the courtesy of last wishes to put certain small things in order. Of course, his wife could find that stuff eventually, but really, he had a pretty unexpected death. So it's the least you can do.

Neither puzzle is especially tricky, though one thing in the note makes amusing sense: you have a lock to open, but it repels your glove, and you may be able to guess why before you open it.

Replaying DMP, it felt very smooth. I enjoyed the jokes along the way, and when I got to the end, I noted in the AMUSING section there were other things I could have done with the glove. DMP was short enough I was glad to go back through and play it. I like it a lot, and I'd like to think it just missed the "commended" level for ShuffleComp, although the vote totals were anonymized. I don't know which it would have replaced. And yet looking back, the author's game writing career seems to have ended as suddenly as poor James Phillips's life. But who knows? He might be back. I hope so.

One other thing: I remember a Grim Fandango CD I bought and never played. From what I understand, this game wasn't just Pratchett-y, but it also owed a small creative debt to Grim Fandango. Somehow, I couldn't find that CD after playing. Maybe I will find it one day.

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Light My Way Home, by Caelyn Sandel (as Venus Hart)
One of the highlights of ShuffleComp 1, September 4, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: ShuffleComp

As LMWH starts off, you don't know what to do, and you don't know who or what you are. But this isn't an amnesia game, far from it. It's a tightly contained game where you, quite simply, have to help someone find their way. You are some sort of ethereal spirit, and you have the ability to give an electric charge to one item at a time. The goal, as stated in the story, is to bring someone home--figuratively or literally.

This person is the most beautiful person you've ever seen, with no direct description why. The story implies it strongly, and it's not hard to figure out, but of course it works better than if you'd been told directly.

Objectively, the person you guide seems a bit stupid as they bump around oddly, but it's not hard to care for them in the game, because of who you guess they might be, and what they need to do, and how powering certain things up makes them move around.

There are only a few things you need to power up or down, but that is enough for a satisfying story. Too much, and the person might seem clueless indeed.

The author seems particularly good at making these nice short stories that provide a quick burst, both as a player and as someone who'd like to make a few more good short games or scenes. Replaying this years after it came out for ShuffleComp, the combination of what I remembered and what I forgot felt about right.

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The Cave of Montauk, by MarWinStudios
Straightforward but pleasing, September 4, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron Treasure Hunt Jam

The Cave of Montauk seemed simple the first time, and indeed, the solution is not hard, but I wound up coming back for the graphics a lot. As part of the Adventuron Cave Jam it's about finding treasure in a cave, guarded by a troll. Getting in is not too bad--you have to figure how to get an apple from some high-up trees, and once inside, you need a light source. These puzzles string together well.

Inside there's some guesswork as to which item a statue wants, but since CoM is not a huge game, a bit of trial and error is more than okay. In fact it shows off some more nice graphics for the side rooms that ultimately don't matter.

CoM is a very safe game, and if it is not terribly ambitious, it's aesthetically pleasing and welcoming, which I think was the thrust of the Adventuron Cave Jam. Though there's no risk getting lost, I still do wish there was a bit more and that the author tackles a bigger project in the future.

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Bloodless on the Orient Express, by Hannes Schueller
Impressive Speed-IF, sending up Agatha Christie and vampires, September 4, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: EctoComp

There's a lot packed into BOE--although it took 3 hours to code (since it is SpeedIF,) the author obviously did a lot of planning in his head to give a very complete experience.

The story is this: you are a vampire, and you need blood. You've already been without it for a bit, and X ME describes you as taller than you should be, but hunched over. Worse, the current train is snowbound, and there's been a murder!

The whodunit is of little to no concern for you. You have your own survival at stake, and the body may give you a lifeline, because the humans traveling all manage to be protected, enough, against you. Nuns wear crucifixes, and so forth.

And there are a few bad endings as you go through the train. There is another vampire you must outwit, and you can also unleash a horrible monster or carelessly expose yourself as a vampire. None of these are the recommended fourth "winning" entry where, it must be said, you show yourself as totally amoral, where you manage to do something awful in plain sight. (Not that the game's explicit about this.)

The highlight of BOE to me is a cooking puzzle that is funny once you see one of the ingredients. Perhaps you can guess it. There are only three ingredients, but as a vampire, you have logistical problems. There are also amusing encounters with other train riders and terse descriptions, especially of anti-vampire items. There is a pet that you will find useful. And in the final scene, you may walk away making quite a good impression.

The author has always been one to go his own way and challenge the status quo. Mister P and his Paul Allen Panks tribute game, The Idol, are examples. BOE deals with more conventional tropes that make us laugh, but it mucks them about cleverly. I enjoyed EctoComp 2011 but would've been surprised if this hadn't won, and years later I'm still impressed with the design and touches of humor.

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Mite, by Sara Dee
I remember this as the "X ME" game, September 4, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2010

I first stumbled on the community in 2010, when I beta tested Leadlight, and -- well, conventions had sprung up. And new programming languages. There was a lot to catch up on! Back then, ABOUT and CREDITS were strongly recommended, and too few people went along with that. And there was the Player's Bill of Rights, as well as other basic stuff parser games should implement.

I think it's no great spoiler to say that Mite requires you to X ME to make a certain puzzle at the end solvable. I got stuck there, despite the nice in-game hints. But even if I'd spun out there, it would have been an enjoyable time.

Mite takes place in some fairy realm where you are a pixy who can jump on mushrooms and flowers and such, and you'll need to. You've found a lost jewel belonging to the prince, and this coupled with your own basic decency and a sense that Things Are Generally Getting Worse lead you to return the jewel. But there are obstacles.

There's a neat puzzle where you must keep track of the wind, another where you must kill a predatory spider, and then there's an invisible bridge you must find and reveal somehow. None of the solutions are mind-blowing, but they are all extremely pleasing to me. And there are all manner of magic creatures and talking animals and such.

When this sort of game is done right you don't really notice the effort and love that must have been put into it. But on taking a step back you soon realize a lot of care into making things work. There certainly was enough care put into this so that I remember it years later. Oh, and also, I think back to it whenever X ME gives me something particularly salient. As X MEs go, it's still one of the best I've read.

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The Sacred Shovel of Athenia, by Andy Galilee
New cat game! Aww, don't turn that needy face down!, September 4, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Spring Thing 2023

It's hard to hate a competently written game that's written around a pet. I dare you! The Big Blue Ball last year was about a dog as the main character, and this is about a cat you wish to befriend. I'm more a cat person than a dog person, but I found both worked well for me. You know what to do, more or less. You have a likable protagonist or NPC. Things can't get too simple, because it would confuse said cat or dog.

SSoA and BBB were first efforts, and they were strong ones. I could play games like this a lot, though I'm sort of hoping for the occasional gerbil or hamster game. Perhaps it has a low ceiling compared to more serious or profound subject matter. But said ceiling is more than high enough, and SSoA is closer to that ceiling. It has all the basic elements of an adventure game and does not feel too basic, and at seven rooms it doesn't try to do too much. So it is closer to the ceiling.

I've had experience making friends with a cat, myself. I have some experience with this. My first ever cat was from a barn in Iowa. He seemed like he really wanted an owner, but the people most likely to adopt him had another cat, and he didn't get along with them. But he got along with people. Well, not me for the first day. When I brought him back home in his cat carrier, he immediately slipped behind the toilet and stayed there. He didn't seem to want to be petted. He wasn't growing or anything. He had just been moved around a whole lot in the past week, and he needed space. So I laid out a litter box, some food, and some water. I think I put some toys out, too. Within 24 hours, I remember playing Pooyan on MAME and I think he liked the music, because he walked in and just jumped on my lap and then on top of the hard drive. He was at home! (I still remember switching from a CRT monitor to a flat-panel one. I felt sort of guilty, giving my cats one less place to sit.)

I wound up having to do nothing, really, to befriend a cat, and SSoA has you do a few things, but with some surreal adventure-game wrinkles. You own a catometer, which is just a fancy name for a bracelet telling you how friendly the cat is at the moment. It starts at red and goes to green, through the rainbow. It's a neat variation on scoring with points, because in relationships, keeping score leads to lots of suspicion. Perhaps even among animals who don't care much about arithmetic. They understand emotions! Also, "0 out of 4" makes the game feel a bit small and technical, which SSoA, in the spirit of adventuring, wishes to avoid, and does! It also says you don't have to do too much to gain the cat's trust without leaving you feeling "there's not much to this game."

The puzzles are not too hard, and they're not meant to be, because this was sort of written for the author's son, about a real-life new cat. There's a key on the other side of a keyhole, with a different solution than us adventure game-playing adults who love Zork would expect. Looking through other reviews, I think others found the potential game-breaking bug which was intentional on the author's part–here, though, it seems like they have a neat loophole which could make sense out of things.

In the comp version there was some suspension of disbelief in the store, from being kicked out when the cat is following you (here it seems like the nice old lady proprietor could/should reject you a lot more softly) to, well, kind of stealing for the correct solution. The author worked to fix that and keep the good absurd bits and provided an alternate solution, which is commendable. The drama at the end when you actually get the shovel involves a fight that does make me smile how it is a wink-wink-nudge-nudge substitute for, say, Excalibur.

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Stygian Dreams, by Giorgos Menelaou

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
AI (partially) rewriting ancient myths. I'm worried it worked so well., September 4, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Spring Thing 2023

This was in the Spring Thing back garden, but I think it would have been at home in the main festival! It's experimental, with AI-generated text, and it's much better than what I've previously seen of AI. There is more discussion of what I felt on and after playing than of the work itself. But I think that's because, if you're as lucky as I was, SD will remind you of things, so to speak. I also found it to be better fleshed out than The Fortuna, which appeared in ParserComp a few months later and also used AI.

This is going to get a bit political, but – well, in this case, I recall reading two very bad AI-generated poems praising Elon Musk and Donald Trump. They had minimal value for ironic humor, at least. But I was able to forget the words and not that, well, AI-generated art or stories can be mind-numbingly painful and little more than a checklist of details. (I couldn't tell if any text was strictly AI-generated, which is a good thing. I suspect the author had a go-through and punched it up.)

And there's another angle. Right-wing trolls' mantra is "Donald Trump is in your head, and you can't get him out of it." But we'd like to, because it would clear things up for what we want to do. (Never mind that certain people are certainly in Trump's head without trying to get there!) How do we get Trump, or anyone, out of our heads? And how can we be sure that if we do, we're not just cutting out legitimate opposing views, period?

SD is not specifically about this, but it helps address these questions. And it's a nice change of pace from works over the years where you have a long quest to enlightenment. Now, many are very worthy indeed. There are some where you decide your eternal fate, such as Michael Hilborn's The Life and Deaths of Dr. M. And there are some where you try to get someone out of your life. And there are others with a big, horrible realization at the end. Sometimes I'm not ready for that. But I can get a lot of mileage out of them, too. See AmandaW's What Heart Heard of, Ghost Guessed. And, of course, there is the whole "you have amnesia" subgenre. Pieces fit together, and actions you made or things you saw or thought that didn't make sense, do. Some stories work well, and some don't. And, in Spring Thing this year, we also have Repeat the Ending, which deals more directly with emotional issues and drowning in one's thoughts.

But this is the first I'm aware of where forgetting is a quest! At the end, after meeting some other spirits, you drink from Lethe. This is a gross oversimplification, and SD provides no outright solutions, but it's a short mythological story that brought up questions I had and gave me enough partial answers to old questions I had. It reminded me briefly of things I let weigh me down, of things I hadn't quite let go of, and of things I let go of enough that when they popped up, I was able to push them back off the front burner. There were even a few people I remembered who couldn't let go of things they should've, people who seemed very with-it and attuned to society's faults big and small, and the semi-tortured souls you got to talk to near the end reminded me of them, and I saw some of those real-life people were just babbling. So that was big for me. I tend to place very high value on "what does this entry do for me," and with SD, this worked. But it can't be too forcing!

And I'm glad, for instance, the souls in the underworld have no grand description. Dante's Inferno–well, I loved it, but I'm just not up to that sort of thing right now. And the souls are simply a former warrior, etc., and they will tell you about themselves, and they ramble on, but not too much. The contrast of "don't you know who I am" versus "I was nobody and didn't really even try" (which to me implied "I don't deserve to try until I square away X") struck me as very important indeed. Both parties deserved to forget who they were or what they did, at least partially–the one, to become better people, and the other, to reach their potential. Although the powerful types reminded me of people who told me I'd better remember or forget. Perhaps they told me I was forgettable, and I shouldn't forget why. (Spoiler: these people probably don't remember me and have probably done this to others, sadly.)

SD is not a huge game, and if it were, that might deflect from its central element. You have an ethereal guide. You meet people who can't forget bad and good things. You learn about yourself a bit, but then you see you get to forget, and you can forget at your own pace, and though there's no Lethe in the physical world, you can go on quests to help you forget things. Said quests are best achieved with more than "PUT THE PAST BEHIND YOU! TODAY IS A NEW DAY!" or "THINK POSITIVE OR YOU'RE SCREWED" books and mantras that tell you, the heck with any awful things you did, live in the now! I've long since seen their faults, even if they accidentally helped me in some ways. And I've searched for better, and things like SD generally help.

I could ramble on a bit about what SD helped me remember for quite a while. Those times I didn't realize I'd been a place before right away, and if I had, I'd have remembered some unfortunate idees fixes. Maybe it was something as simple as approaching a park from the west instead of the north, as I did ten years ago. SD reminded me, too, forgetfulness comes in layers–you realize you took longer between sessions when something awful hammered you. And it made me ask, what else did I put aside, or work to put aside? Perhaps it was a high school classroom where I did not enjoy myself. I took pictures of how different it looked and deleted them from my phone mistakenly. Then it occurred to me I didn't really want or need to keep the pictures. And I remembered how I had some memories in place trying to neutralize other bad memories, but the defensive memories weren't even that good.

We mortals don't have a magic bullet to forget things. At least, not without potentially proving our mortality. So we have to make do. We find something that lets us back-bench the worst of our thoughts, and if we don't forget them, we put them where they can be recalled instead of forcibly remembered. We can say, okay, I've accounted for enough, I can put that aside.

The cheap jokes just write themselves. They'd obviously be unfair, but somehow they helped with putting things in perspective. "I had something brilliant but I forgot it." "This game is about forgetting, and it's true to its colors by being forgettable." "I forget the most relevant detail, but in the spirit of the game I don't want to go back and read it and remember something long-term." None of these zingers are fair, emotionally or logically, but they were fun thought experiments and got me wondering what I felt I had to remember or wanted to. I felt okay quickly remembering and forgetting some bad things from my life, and I felt confident others would not stay. And i have to admit, I forget some parts of SD already! And I know sometimes certain writings can stir up personality-cult-like "oh, this is what life is about." But I believe SD stirred up things legitimately worth writing about for (looks at word count) 1000-2000 words.

So: forgetfulness is a complex thing. It's scary, because you know forgetting certain things would diminish yourself. But using it to lessen emotional baggage can be a way to grow. And SD reminded me of that. But perhaps it's better to riff on two lines from the Eagles' Hotel California, with its own dreamlike qualities:

* "Some dance to remember, some dance to forget" Playing SD, I realized things I wanted to remember and forget, and I picked and chose according to my own arbitrary standards.
* "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave." In SD, though, you can check out from memories, AND you can leave them behind.

Or to mention a more technical, practical example. We all have our "Hello World" lessons for coding. And we learn stuff and forget it. I've felt guilty having to look up something that seems simple twice, or something I learned early that helped stuff click, as if that proves I don't have real mastery. But the truth is–I'm making a calculated decision to say, I believe I can put X aside to learn Y, which will have greater long-term impact. And holding onto the trivial knowledge for X gets in the way. It's different from, say, ditching friends who helped you when you hit rock bottom now you're successful.

I got a lot out of SD, enough that I planned to write a review before Spring Thing ended, and two days later I finally sat down once my thoughts settled. And it was almost scary to have someone pop up on another forum who hadn't posted for 13 years. I had forgotten them, but then I remembered (positive) stuff they said in a different context. Perhaps this is a crazy coincidence or, perhaps, I can say without getting too swell a head–if you ask questions and look for answers enough, and stumble across enough good works like SD, things are bound to happen together, and it feels like lightning struck, but really, it's just a form of the birthday paradox, where two neat things will be unexpectedly close, and you can learn a lot from that, and you don't have to worry why it happened.

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Mushroom Hunt, by Polyducks
No, you don't die from the poisonous ones, September 3, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron Treasure Hunt Jam

Mushroom Hunt is a very well-done game for the Adventuron Cave Jam. It's might be the least cave-y entry, with the cave being tough to find and not even necessary to, well, make a good version of mushroom stew. You see, Granny has entrusted you with looking for mushrooms, and there's even a book on which are poisonous and which aren't. It's a bit surreal, as I don't know many blue or red mushrooms, and you wind up picking a polkadot mushroom, but it's rather a relief you don't need any detailed taxonomy, here.

The presentation is very attractive, with colorful ASCII art for the room graphics, and the game's nicely set out in a square (with the cave off to the side)--Granny's house is in the center, and you walk around and examine the scenery. Unlike most Adventuron games, critical stuff isn't highlighted, because mushroom hunts are meant to be a search. It's not a standard adventure, and there's a nice sense of surprise when something does turn up.

As Brian Rushton mentioned in his review, I too found a bottleneck with one item that opens up a whole bunch of other areas. I had a feeling there was an unusual lot of scenery I could cut away, and this proved right--my first story ended in just picking three mushrooms and making a soup that left Granny and me sick all night. So there's some "you need to look at A so that B reveals C." But it makes sense--it's a relatively commonplace item, but it's hinted at, and it's something you as a kid might be intimidated to have to handle. Once I got through it, though, it opened up a lot. Having that mystery fit in well with the game story, where you had a grandmother you maybe didn't know well.

There are ten total mushrooms out there, and five are safe. (That's a 1/12 chance of winning by accident if you found all the mushrooms.) The game offers no hints of if you have put the right mushroom in the pot, leading to some anxiety even if you're pretty sure you read the book carefully. I sort of wish I'd saved before giving the mushrooms so I could see if there was a particularly horrible end for the maximum toxicity (the author assures you you won't die) but I was surprised how well the ending worked when I just stopped by having gotten three mushrooms, not caring if they were poisoned, just wanting to see the end. It certainly captured some of my fear and excitement of seeing mushrooms in the forest and knowing my own great-grandmother knew which ones to pick, but I had no clue.

The attractive graphics are hardly the only nice bit about Mushroom Hunt. The descriptions make it interesting to sort out what you need to look for, but it's not so confusing you throw your hands up at looking around. And while it is, to some degree, "just keep examining until you get to the end of the road," it's a well-chosen subject, well-executed, and I'm not surprised it had broad appeal.

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Escape the Cave of Magic, by Sleuthgames

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Fun, despite the instadeaths, September 2, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron Treasure Hunt Jam

Escape the Cave of Magic is a fairly straightforward and fun game written for the Adventuron Cave Jam. The title is a misnomer, as not only do you escape the cave but the planet it's on. You've just found the crystals that will provide energy for your spaceship to leave, and now you just have to get back. This is not so easy. My nitpicking self wondered why didn't these barriers stop me from getting to the cave, where I wound up in the bottom.

But nevertheless, I enjoyed slugging past a troll and a dark knight, finding that certain treasure was worthwhile and other stuff wasn't. There were some fights with the parser (ROW BOAT versus ROW) and odd error messages, and for another critical item, I used the wrong verb, (Spoiler - click to show)CLIMB TREES instead of (Spoiler - click to show)X TREES. But the game is simple enough you don't have to sweat that too often, and the variety in graphics gives it a nice Sierra-like retro feel.

Looking back, there were definite inconsistencies and holes in the storyline (an early instadeath is clued, but something should have been mentioned in the introduction,) and the parser was finicky. But it's a fun jaunt through a bunch of landscapes, and there's a neat non-mapping solution to a maze, which has a nonreciprocal direction, but fortunately it's only 8 rooms.

This game felt middle of the pack more than top 3 and I suspect the neat graphics and relatively easy puzzles (once you bounce off the parser, it's clear what to do) swung in its favor. I'm being a bit harsh here, especially since it seems English is not the author's first language (which accounts for some wonky phrasing,) but nonetheless, if you want something quick to play, there's some fun interaction with NPCs neutral, opposed and friendly.

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A Troll's Revenge, by Gareth Pitchford
Ahh, the adventurers had it coming. Maybe they'll learn., September 2, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron Treasure Hunt Jam

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.

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A Figure Met in a Shaded Wood, by Michael Thomét

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
"Come, sit here, click through a while and learn something of yourself.", September 2, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2015

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.

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The House at the End of Rosewood Street, by Michael Thomét

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Fooled me, I missed the "good" ending first time through, September 2, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2013

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.

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The Body, by Sean Barrett
Down out by the river, WAY down WAY out by the river, September 2, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: SpeedIF Jacket

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?

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The House on Sycamore Lane, by Paul Michael Winters

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Great story, lacks technical polish, September 2, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2019

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.

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Mental Entertainment, by Thomas Hvizdos

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Oh look! AI is even more worrying in 2023 than 2019!, September 1, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2019

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.

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The Best Man, by Stephen Bond

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Emotionally brutal on many levels but (for me) ultimately rewarding, September 1, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

With Rameses and The Cabal and now The Best Man, Stephen Bond is now a resounding three-for-three in the "be very, very harsh on the player character" department. It's not slapstick stuff, no physical wounds or financial ruin. Just brutal existential despair and failure and helpless and pointing out how the main character misses the point. The Best Man helped me revisit certain unfortunate relationships with better perspective, but on the other hand, I'm sort of glad I don't know Stephen Bond very well/at all, because I'd be absolutely frightened of any character portrait he might make of me.

You see, I really wanted to believe Aiden, the main character, sees a way through the abuse he received by the end, that his final statement he's put stuff behind him is true. I hoped and believed, and in my mind, it was so. I didn't want to reread _The Best Man_ to disprove this. Once I did, though, I had to change my opinion. I'd simply blocked out the worst parts, because I wasn't in the mood to cringe at the time. Surely Aiden had learned from these experiences? I'd had a few, wher I idealized people and I realized they weren't so great. And to me, Aiden was not as outwardly horrible as the social circle he was sucked into. But that's not much. He's the nicest guy around, and the nicest guy he knows, and it's good enough for him, and it isn't. I felt icky saying "boy, I sort of identify with Aiden there" or "I've seen that/been there before." It was a rough experience. It left me feeling I wished I'd stood up to a few people who were as outwardly respectable as Aiden's clique, people long gone. But it also made me realize how hard that sort of thing is. Dryly speaking, we're all prone to a sunk-cost fallacy. Most of us stop sinking, though. With Aiden, though, I wondered if perhaps he were a bit autistic--I'm not a doctor, but his treatment at the hands of his acquaintances reminded me of seeing some other people on a long-ago message board "just teasing" someone who was. So perhaps this story could be read not about Aiden but about human cruelty. It's important to recognize that Aiden is a very flawed individual, but the author does make it pretty clear that his so-called friends are worse, just more polished.

And he appears to have nailed things down, starting with the cover art. A white suit is unusual for a best man, and along with the title, it immediately brought to mind Philip Larkin's "Sympathy in White Major." This poem calls into question what selflessness and likability really are. The critical line is (Spoiler - click to show)"Here's to the whitest man I know, though white is not my favorite color." And, in fact, white isn't Aiden's favorite color, deep down, but he has no choice. I wondered if this would be another story about a repressed good-guy, or someone trying to be a good guy. It is, and the only question is if he breaks away from that. We've all done good deeds and not puffed our chest out. We've all felt a bit self-righteous at times. We've all been pinned down by compliments and unable to say "Not this time" and made unreasonable requests of our own, or we've had to pick and choose our fights. But Aiden seems in an active cycle of doing the technically right thing and feeling more miserable. He's unable to walk away, until he has to run way.

Aiden certainly has his fantasies about people realizing what a good guy he is. He's not even the first choice for best man at the wedding of Laura, a girl he had a crush on, a girl who likely used him as a social crutch and yes-man until she found someone she could live with. The groom-to-be is John, who, as we read more of the story, is really a male version of Laura. Aiden doesn't see this, and it didn't really hit me until later. Of course what Aiden sees as bad in John, he sees as joie de vivre in Laura. And on re-reading I think John and Laura kept Aiden in reserve for the sort of drudgeworthy tasks a hungover best man would not want to perform. Aiden wears white to be "on team Laura," as if weddings are competitive. And he's foolish enough to think he's running these errands just for Laura.

But it turns out Colm, John's main best man, has worse than a hangover. He suffered a very avoidable accident after Aiden left the stag party early. It was Colm's fault, and perhaps the best man also has a few last-minute errands to run, but hey, John and Laura were thinking of Aiden! They go looking to Aiden for aidin', we begin the flashbacks. Aiden meets Laura in college, waiting for a bus. She tries to "get him to live," as she "gently" reminded him of the ways he may be a bit silly. (Note: getting him to live didn't mean helping him live as he wanted, or well, just bringing excitement.) One of Aiden's attempts at spontaneity results in a pathetic act of littering. His choices of dialogue range from passive-aggressive to snarky, but the results are the same. Aiden's certainly self-absorbed, and he looks up to self-absorbed people like Laura who seem more absorbed than he is. John swoops by two years later, and he's a better match for Laura. She respects him a lot more. Perhaps she's been able to use Aiden. She knows that small things like a touch matter a lot to him--too much, perhaps. She gets him to like a teal-colored scarf. But a man like that won't stay interesting.

And Aiden also ascribes virtues to her that aren't there. At one point there's a buildup to "she gave me my agency," which, nuh-uh. None of his choices matter. And her laughing at him? Well, it feels nice, because it feels nicer than when guys do. It feels like life. "She created this world of ours, this was her world, and she chose not to live in it," Aiden says, unaware of how easy it was to create such a world and how empty it was and even how she tried to expand it, but he said no. Aiden seems in love with the idea of love. Later when Laura suggests he get to know Ash, a girl in her circle, better, Aiden says, well, he couldn't love Ash as well as he loved Laura. Truth, of a sort. So another member of the bachelor party, Nick, winds up dating her. It didn't work out, but Nick does seem better adjusted. Aiden's "Before I learned — before she forced me to learn — what it is to care about another human being" rings hollow because, well, you can't force someone to learn that sort of thing. And indeed, it's not clear what Aiden's learned, and in the scene Nick narrates, Nick picks things apart more meaningfully than Aiden does. He's cynical (weddings are a racket so stock up on "free" food, the stag party bored him) but sees Aiden as better than the lackeys and with some hope, because the difference between errand-boy and "person reciprocally actively encouraging bad behavior" is significant.

But that didn't stop me from thinking, geez, Aiden's really a sucker, isn't he? "I had to find that love within me. I had to find the energy to be there for you ... even at my own cost." But did it really cost him if his main goal was to be around Laura? I remembered people I looked up to or had crushes on, but I wasn't that bad, right? Stephen Bond is more eloquent. But there are passages interspersed, of the people Aiden meets. The people preparing the organ music for the wedding see him wandering around. Their lives may not be full, and they have faults, but they are self-aware. The couple selling the roses grumbles about things, but they at least account for others' behavior (each alternately forgives and lambastes the bad behavior of various wedding parties) and try to respond to each other's complaints. There's no hierarchy.

But Aiden still sees one: "Our group of friends, now pruned down to the classic 'gang of five' (the two of us, Aisling, Deirdre and Orla), held court every night in a different venue; we pronounced on topics far and wide; we praised the worthy and dealt justice to the deserving." One wonders how much pronouncing Aiden did, and how much he was there just to be someone to talk at. One even wonders how much he listened to said topics. Just before the wedding, he thinks "Orla, but sometimes you can go too far, sometimes you can be hurtful. Laura somehow is able to temper your worst excesses." Laura, who encouraged him to "live" and be snarky. As he himself says, bouncing from nostalgia to bitterness: "You started hanging out together once and you hang out together now and maybe later you'll hang out again and that's it. That's your story." He does a lot of that, based on his mood.

And he never admits that, well, he is at the bottom of the hierarchy. His neediness shows just before the wedding reception when he asks for a good-bye individually from each of the bridesmaids, which is maybe appropriate if you are twelve. He also has two tasks before the wedding, and he checks off with Laura to say he's got the first part of her requests done, and she blows him off beyond what he deserves for rambling on a bit. You suspect she'd have said "Oh, I was WORRIED about you, it was so senseless not to check in" if he hadn't called. And John gets in on the act, too. Colm returns miraculously (?) for a speech and a roast of John, but next it's Aiden who's roasted for his white suit. His speech as Best Man is, on the surface, decent, though it does contain a passive-aggressive slap at Nick, who deserves it the least. It gets scattered applause, where Colm gets roaring laughter. And this is tricky: you want to do the right thing, despite it all, but with Aiden, perhaps the right thing is to recognize when your good efforts aren't making anyone happy and say "enough." And he never can.

Aiden doesn't realize the no-win situations he's in. There's one brief scene where he calls Laura to say, yes, I got the flowers and I'm going to get the ring, and she lets him know she's busy and he'd better not call unless he has to and that's awkward, and my immediate reaction was, if he didn't, Laura would tell him it was awkward not to check up briefly. Then you/Aiden hang on for a bit for some empty chatter, to drive home Aiden's need for approval. He's pushed around by John's creepy cousin who hits on someone well below his age. The bridesmaids chide him for eating desserts left for the guests, then finish what he took a bite of. John gets gum on his expensive shoes and somehow still manages to embarrass Aiden a bit. Neither set of parents even recognized Aiden--no, Laura either didn't have a picture of him or take time to show one or even mention the white suit.

Even Laura and John's wedding march, Deep Blue Something's "Breakfast at Tiffany's," may be a joke at Aiden's expense. The church staff mention it is an inside joke, but it's never explained.

And I said, "What about Breakfast at Tiffany's?" / She said, "I think I remember the film" / And as I recall I think we both kind of liked it / And I said, "Well, that's the one thing we've got"

Aiden is saying this in his mind to Laura, even as they have drifted apart. And yet, Laura may be leaving him hanging, and perhaps she enjoys it, and she can use it to get him to do something. She knows she can point to the one thing they've got, in order to get him to do something. (Note: I still hate the song, even after I see its purpose here, because it's always felt too whiny. It's very apt here, though. Especially when the characters confuse it with other 90s songs I realize could be confused together. It's as if he could easily write something uplifting and lighthearted, but why bother?)

But the greatest humiliation may be internal. Aiden, of course, would love to blow up the wedding, and he has many choices at the moment where he hands over the rings, but each way he's foiled, often by someone different, and people forget about it. If you try to pocket the rings, someone grabs them effortlessly. If you wear John's ring, for instance, it's way too big for you and falls off, and to me that captured how John was just more imposing, physically and mentally, than Aiden. The worst you get is a sardonic "he had one job," which reminds me of how the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy changed its entry on Earth from "Harmless" to "Mostly Harmless." The least awful option is just to seethe and hand over the rings.

I'm not sure which hurts worse, being blown off or actively mocked, but Aiden certainly gets both. And I know I have. The first time I realized it was when someone younger than me in high school had the temerity to do so. There were episodes like where people told me I needed to swear more and not be a prude, and then I did and they laughed and they said I didn't do it right. But I recognized this--I think. I found ways forward, things to study, and so forth, so my time focusing on myself wasn't focusing on the approval of someone louder. Aiden doesn't seem to have that. He simply can't bring himself to say: these people are at fault, full stop. He'll kvetch about how they bug people, but he never says, "well, here's what I can do better." His looks inward are about him and Laura and climax with a scene in the bookstore five years later--no, he says, two--and which go off the rails as he nails down how best to imagine a meeting with Laura, now divorced from John. While the marriage doesn't seem like it will be happy, because Laura and John are fundamentally unhappy people, Aiden's constant revisions make it pretty clear he's going beyond the occasional daydreams about someone that got away. This registered with me the first time through, but I didn't process how bad it was. Perhaps it's because I've dealt with people like Aiden and learned to zone them out for survival's sake. It wasn't until I reread the game and noticed how Aiden would adjust and edit text that already appeared, that I saw -- this isn't a daydream, it's meant to be a habit. And the proofreading he does is never "well, I might not be making sense here." It's florid stuff like "(Reifying the symbolism of the incident with the crisp bag.)"

I didn't see a lot of this the first time through. Then, when I re-read, I realized how grateful I was for the non-Aiden scenes. With the excitement of initial discovery gone, I found Aiden's constant choices between passive-aggression and aggression exhausting. I sort of assumed "Oh, Aiden meant to say that but just forgot. He was too busy at the time. There was a wedding, and so forth." But all the same, we are getting Aiden's story, and that's what he chose to discuss, and when he digressed, it wasn't about what he learned, it was just about his next immediate problem. And his ruminations are "I will find the right words to make everything okay"--common magical thinking in many unhealthy relationships and, of course, in The Best Man, none of Aiden's choices turn out to be the right words to make anything okay.

The Best Man was a difficult read for me, but a good one. It can be hard to deal with times you thought were good and now realize weren't. Or times you thought you were being the best you could, but you really needed to stop pouring emotional energy down a drain. Or to have friends/acquaintances who tell you you'd better not embarrass anyone, because you're sort of prone to that, and then have these people embarrass you, because just being decent is boring. Or to see that people who were "just joking" were really being kind of mean and, more importantly, to find a way to deal with it.

Aiden does so with platitudes. Some are pretty black-and-white, such as when he talks about "the good guys." Others feel transparent, talking about faith or "I had to find that love within me." Or he talks about having to do good deeds and bury it -- but boy, does he remind you how you buried it! Since Aiden has an engaging sort of self-absorption, it's possible he has indeed, as he said at the end, done some good, more good for people than, say, if they'd made friends with John. Ameliorating nastiness isn't great, but it's better than nothing. People who don't know him very well might actually learn something, in the same way a fortune teller can accidentally remind you of something you want to do. But I can't see this as a basis for a healthy relationship. It may be a long relationship, if the recipient is as naive as Aiden, but not healthy. And it's sad that this is the best some people can do or be.

The ending, where Aiden talks about darkness, reminded me of friends, or nominal friends, who treated me as a second option, yet I still enjoyed how they were "opening me up to life" until I realized the truth later. Then I realized they were sort of mean, and much later I realized I hadn't thought about them for a few years and I was over them, though they were good "don't fall into that trap again" reference points. Man, high school sucked. Aiden, however, is a college graduate.

And I certainly think that believing others can improve, even if it isn't likely, helps me improve. But Aiden the unreliable narrator, looking to change his story beyond the standard "Oops, I meant..." seems to hide actively from changing himself. Perhaps, with the social circle he claims at the end, he has taken over John's role despite saying "that darkness is behind me now." Or perhaps he is not quite as insufferable as John, but he can buttonhole you for ten minutes. Maybe he's easier to blow off or admit you're tired of him. I'd like to believe he's become a better person, but I suspect on meeting Aiden I'd be very interested at first, and then things would fall off quickly and I'd look for any excuse to duck further conversation.

All the same, though, I'm left feeling how tragic it is Aiden found people who gave him bad life advice, not out of evil, but out of their own selfishness, a more exciting self-absorption than his, and he tried to learn from that. How much that leaves him off the hook for his long-term cluelessness, I can't answer. I do know Aiden failed to strike a balance between lashing out when someone goes overboard and soft-pedaling the "hey, ease up there, huh?" He certainly chooses his battles wrong. And so do I. I've had my share of Walter Mitty fantasies about standing up to people or maybe telling them, I saw what you did twenty years ago. The Best Man brought a lot of that back. But I also think they prepared me to actually stand up, and my fantasies of "what I really want to say" have a lot less anger. Whether or not Aiden became a good person, I see his potential pitfalls as my own, and I certainly want to make sure I didn't react or dwell as badly as Aiden did.

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Limerick Quest, by Pace Smith

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
In 2019, IFComp / Had one game that promised this romp *, September 1, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

The third Pace Smith game to entail
All limericks: pass, or a fail?
Though Limerick Heist
Quite greatly enticed
Such rhyming can quickly go stale.

Rejoice! There is no need for bile.
On playing there is no denial
The meter is sharp
And no one could carp
About lack of humor or style.

Two characters drawn from part one
Seek further enrichment and fun
So Russia's the place
Where they soon embrace
A dangerous underground run

Some bits in fact you may find neater.
So practical, too, for the reader:
The list of stuff carried
Throughout is quite varied
But it always goes with the meter.

There's puzzles where you will be spurred
To fill in the right-sounding word.
At first they seem clear
But later oh dear
they're tricky, but never absurd.

The best one to mess with your head:
A tomb, with a hundred count thread
Which number to pick?
The reasoning's slick.
You'll need to yoink three from the dead.

Your treasure, alas, can get crushed.
Choose wrong nearby, your fortune's flushed.
Each way your escape
Is a narrow scrape:
Timed finish-the-poem, not too rushed.

If this leaves you feeling disturbed
"A choice game left me guess-the-verbed"
Some letters get filled
While precious time's killed
And thus extreme tension is curbed.

To recap the things I just said, it's
Quite clearly in no need of edits.
The meta-text, too
Will make you go "ooh:"
Slick endings list, options and credits.

* the title box bars
stuff past 80 chars.
I feel so repressed now, womp womp.

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Into That Good Night, by Iain Merrick

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Wish I'd seen this back in 2001, but there's really no bad time to, September 1, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: SpeedIF DNA Tribute

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.

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A Night at Milliways, by Graeme Pletscher

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
I wanted to eat at the Restaurant as a kid, too, September 1, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: SpeedIF DNA Tribute

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.

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How Many Roads Must a Man Walk Down?, by Tom Waddington

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
His name is not John Watson, September 1, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: SpeedIF DNA Tribute

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.

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Being the Little Guy, by Adam Biltcliffe

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
SpeedIF where you can win with 0 out of 40 points!, August 31, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: SpeedIF Jacket

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.

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The President, The Democrats, and Smelly Pete, by David Cornelson
Nice quick entertainment, given the prompts the author was given, August 31, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: SpeedIF Jacket

I don't think anyone would or could have made a game like this on their own. This was part of Speed-IF 2, which had a bunch of blurbs you had to write a story around. Whether authors got to draft them like fantasy football, I don't know. But I imagine the ones at the bottom were, in fact, very tough to work around indeed. And once we know that there were these constraints, the whole bit becomes a lot funnier. It goes from "maybe the author was trying too hard" to "wow, I wouldn't have tried that hard to get things working as well as they did."

You play as George W. Bush ("I started out disliking the PC, but then I grew more sympathetic as I found out what it's really like to *be* that character." -- this part aged well considering the years 2017-2020) and in a forest maze ("When I started in a maze, I quit. Once I forced myself to try it again, though, I realized that [the author] had really produced a novel solution to that old problem.") near the beltway. The solution is rather interesting. You must interact with a rat named Rat Rat, eat some food in the kitchen, and then face Smelly Pete ("I'm definitely not looking forward to the sequel--one game revolving around the
exploits of "Smelly Pete" is one game too many.") and a bunch of Democrats, delightfully described on the author's own admission as "They're just a gang of shoddily dressed democrats milling around." Indeed.

You can spend a lot of time asking the various NPCs about each other but there is only one action that matters. The denouement is slightly on the tasteless side but I still laughed even though I'd heard that sort of joke before and, besides, the author did a good job of fitting everything into the SpeedIF Jacket constraints, which included a ludicrous conspiracy theory. It's been 20+ years, but I saw what the author did there, and it made me smile.

I suppose it's easy to overdose on this sort of thing, but given that I saw this name, remembered it and saw it again and said "this time I'm playing it," it provided good entertainment value for the time spent.

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Sweetpea, by Sophia de Augustine

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A rich look at waiting with fear, paced well, August 31, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

I still have a pile of the author's games from recent Twine jams to look through and hopefully review if I have anything constructive to say about them. It's one of those things--I'm worried about just being a bad matchup as a reader, and yet, I also know that the potentially bad matchups that work out are what really help flip a switch to say aha, I see this or that, now.

The core of Sweetpea for me was waiting for an unreliable parent and also finding creative ways to avoid tackling problems head-on, because some are tough to face as a kid (or as an adult.) You should just go down to the door and let your father in, but you emotionally can't. You're distracted by other stuff.

There's also more than a suggestion of alcoholism, but there are no waving bottles of booze, and it's likely better that way. And the waiting is quite tense and good, looking around your mansion for good memories from your young life with your father. Everything seems off. Even trying to open the window is a chore. Along the way, someone or something called Michael is described. They are important.

I found myself doubting whether or not the father would actually improve. What is clear is that he means to, and it is not trivial. And it reminded me of adults who failed to improve, with various degrees of ability or motivation to, and I remember feeling like Sweetpea, that they would figure this adult stuff out, even if they were not extra-super-brilliant. They don't. Well, we don't.

I found the imaginary-friend bits quite emotionally realistic as even though I'm too old for imaginary friends, I still picture someone faceless dishing out general guidelines on how Things Must Be, or what would writer X or Y that I like say about the situation? Oh, of course they can't help me, and they don't know, but the distraction helps me cope.

I had some small issues at first with what seemed like a loop, but I assume that's just to capture a child's hesitancy to go forward with what really matters and instead latch on to a safe choice that might avoid conflict, so that worked. The key is to note that you'll have a choice if there is a horizontal-rule break.

I've read through twice and noticed a lot of clues I missed the first time through. I'm still not quite sure how much of the end is Sweetpea's imagination. Sadly, even after something like the end, some people who mean to do better can't keep it up. But I enjoyed the descriptions of waiting and delay and procrastination that were well above "life sucks, why do anything." A few of them hit home for me, ones probably much happier for Sweetpea than her father, who probably didn't know how much certain small things had done for her, who may not have been trying to do anything nice, but it left a small memory for her. We should all strive to capitalize on memories like this, and in this case, it's not clear how happy the memories really are for Sweetpea as she searches through the mansion to do anything but face her father, but they are better than what she has.

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Collision, by manonamora

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Once there was this player who got into an accident, August 31, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

This is one of those "something's up" games. I hope to avoid spoilers in the review proper, but you are in a car, and there is, as the title suggests, a collision up ahead. You have many things to try, but not much works in six turns. Still, you get to restart pretty easily. So it is just a matter of lawnmowering, right? There are only so many options!

The descriptions are purposefully odd, with two-word sentences that work well for who you are and the constraints of Neo Twiny Jam. There are optional sound effects and, rather neatly, options for French or English text. While the last may not strictly speaking add value, it could be a useful learning tool that's far more interesting than, say, asking Arnaud or Francois where the bathrooms are or what time it is.

It's not the first helplessness simulator and won't be the last, but it's unique. Some not-quite-full spoilers ahead: (Spoiler - click to show)the cover art is a big clue, and it may've helped me guess what was going on in-game, though it (rightly) didn't clue the way through.

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The Unseemly Virus, by cpollett
Two full games in one, in under 500 words, August 31, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

Of course, viruses have been a big thing since 2020, what with COVID. It almost made us forget those other viruses that sprang up back in 2000--computer viruses! I guess the term malware is used now, as a more overarching term for "bad stuff people can do to your computer without you knowing it."

But virus is still a term. And here the author plays on it. You, as Dr. Sam Cure (unless you want to change your name, which is a nice touch,) have a choice between defusing a biological and computer virus. The original Twiny Jam had a 300 word limit, so I guess both of these games would've fit in there.

There are a few branches, and if you pick the wrong one you get gaffled by the FBI or IRS (the computer virus is a tax-fraud scheme,) or worse. There were some sudden deaths and all, but this being a 500-word jam, there wasn't much to recover, and we couldn't expect a detailed response.

Besides, the cheery colorful cartoon pictures (even the one where law enforcement is frowning) make up for it immediately. I didn't notice this right away, because my internet was slow, but once they started popping up, I tracked back around to the insta-deaths to see them all. You can do this with no problem in a short game!

There is one puzzle, figuring out the password for the computer, because computer conspiracies and passwords of course go together. It's of the "it's in the game text somewhere, and all the other words aren't particularly highlighted" type. But that is okay. Not every Neo Twiny Jam entry provides deep social commentary here. In fact, it might become exhausting. TUV advertises a good time, and it gives one.

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You Could Stay Here Forever, by KnightAnNi

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Malls had a mystique once. They still do., August 31, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

This is a story about the last night of a closed mall before it is demolished. You sneak in, hoping to find memories. It’s well done, with the sound manipulated at a critical point.

I haven’t visited a mall in ages but I am sad to read of ones I liked closing down. I remember thinking when I grew up I would go to one of those big malls and eventually buy one item from each store, except maybe the jewelry and such. But when I grew up I generally had favorite bargain outlets or waited for the day after Thanksgiving or Christmas to pick up sales.

Adults would moan how malls got rid of forests or parks or whatever when I was young, and these days I'm sort of mourning the loss of malls and food courts and such, even though I never spent much there and appreciate when bike paths or nature areas are set aside. Malls seem so impractical, but of course we can't drown in those memories.

YCSHF captures that and in a different way from Jim Aikin’s super-long The Only Possible Prom Dress, which also takes place after-hours in a mall, but it celebrates the oddities of malls with all sorts of odd stores with jokes. Here the limited word count here leaves plenty of mystery and reminds me of how malls got smaller, or they started having empty storefronts. And yet I'd still love to explore more of this abandoned mall. Both works got me to thinking of franchises I saw in all sorts of malls and went bankrupt. I finally Googled a few of them.

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Scale, by lavieenmeow

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Have goldfish thoughts, do goldfish things, August 30, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

The Neo Twiny Jam and its word limit were good for mood pieces where, dang it, you don't have to explain yourself, and it would feel wrong to, and it'd go over the word count anyway. So it provoked a number of fun entries where, well, a variety of main characters couldn't explain themselves!

In the case of Scale, you're a fish in a tank which isn’t very big. Not much happens, allegedly. But it’s surprisingly absorbing. There are the typical things you find in a tank, like a rock, or bubbles, and you get fed every night, with seasons turning at an alarming rate. There’s also a chest you may be lucky enough to see open. It took me a while, and I’m not sure if it was out of skill or luck or just persistence.

There’s some nice humor in here. It’s slightly surreal and yet feels like you expect a goldfish-pet’s life would feel. I was sort of worried I would die, so I kept playing, and it says something that I kept playing for a while that I looked at the source. It's one of those works you remember with a smile. The lack of (meaningful) agency charmed me and never felt oppressive.

It was disturbing to take a step back and realize my own leisure could be described similarly: "you go to the library/athletic center/store/tinker around at your computer." But I still enjoyed the experience.

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A/The Gift, by b_splendens

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Any gift is better than no gift, right? Right?, August 30, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

This is a short Twine about someone who receives what feels (to me) like an inappropriate, random gift and being quite confused about it.

I think a lot is left to the reader’s interpretation, because the choices you took the first time are crossed out, which I realize is nontrivial Twine coding, whether branches at any one page lead to the same next page or somewhere different. And different information is given on different passages through.

I think we've all gotten gifts in the mail we find hard to throw out. We understand it's a business and a bunch of emotional manipulation going on. But there's something odd when it comes from a person--especially a person whom we didn't like much. If it's appropriate--well, how did they know so much about us? If it's inappropriate--well, can't we give them credit for trying? The whole thing reminds me of the South Park episode where the food pantry gets a lot of creamed corn from donors. A fancy watch is, of course, more valuable than creamed corn, but -- it's not exactly uplifting, is it? In fact, it would stand out next to cheap clothes and maybe even be an easy target for thieves.

I’ve certainly been suspicious of people who’ve given me gifts for no reason before after some bad history. I’ve had people suddenly be nice to me for a bit, often with ulterior motives. Perhaps in this case the (very) wealthy benefactor feels they’ve washed away some sin. Maybe they feel guilty they got out of the town they hated, or maybe they remember doing something bad to the narrator. But there is no indication their act would be a net positive.

This seems deliberate on the author's part. The title of A/The suggests the giver has given out other gifts like this before. So there's an odd spooky feeling This one is odd and spooky without anything supernatural. Just maybe someone trying to whitewash something in the past. At least that's what I got from it. Given this is Neo Twiny Jam and the author said you can fill in details, there's enough flexibility in the story, you may find your own interpretation.

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Sprinklepills!, by Lance Cirone

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
It's all fun and games until YOU have to make a cold call in real life!, August 30, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

I remember the author's name looking familiar, and then I realized they'd written a lot of IFDB reviews. I hadn't recalled them writing any works that could be reviewable on IFDB, so I was glad to see Neo Twiny Jam gave them an opportunity to be on the other side.

This is a short conversation where you head to a doomed sales pitch, which is doomed because of your social awkwardness and the uselessness of what you’re selling. It’s benevolent towards the poor confused protagonist (punching down would be easy but wrong) who may have visions of being someone who repurposes or synergizes (obligatory buzzword) two ideas that, well, are less than the sum of their parts. They think they have found something new. Perhaps the only reason it is or seems new is that everyone else who thought of it ignored it.

I may be reading too much into this, but the night before playing, I was reading yet another article about how everyone in America is fed that you need to be an entrepeneur to really make it, or entrepeneurs deserve a lot more than work drones, or do you really just want to be in a cubicle all your life without being able to order people around? Or wave stuff in front of people’s faces saying "You don’t know you want this, but really, you do," and then they fawn and say "Oh my goodness yes we always wanted this but never realized it?" You should have ambition! It keeps the economy running, and stuff!

The poor main character in this piece has ambition and persistence. It’s easy to poke holes in what they do. But I think of all the times I tried to combine two unrelated things together and failed, and I felt I deserved to make that connection, and I was pretty sure I had something new. I was never brave enough to go to a bunch of CEOs with my ideas. Maybe that was for the better.

Still, I want to try piecing things together and making connections, in my writing, even if I fail as badly as the Sprinklepills salesperson. It really captured a lot of the fears I would feel if I were in a job where I had to make a lot of cold calls. It even got me out of my chair and in a good enough mood to take care of some things that made much more sense than selling Sprinklepills.

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The Paper Mache Puppet, by LoAvis

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
As the title says, you can find your own meaning, August 30, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

This was an entry in Neo Twiny Jam but would clearly also have fit in the Single Choice Jam conducted by the same organizers as well. It's pretty simple--you are a papier-mache puppet among a bunch of wooden ones. You fall apart more quickly, and while you'll be put back together after dancing like the wooden puppets, there's a worry your creator won't do this if you go your own way.

Given that PPP advertises itself as queer horror there are obvious parallels e.g. "come on, you have more rights than you would've had in the 60s. Turn that frown upside-down!" or some such nonsense. You're doing ... well enough, right? But you want more.

This is hardly a new theme but it's always nice to see it expressed in new ways, and here, it is.

Maybe it's that I don't like to talk about the same sorts of things most people do, or read the same things.​​ Or maybe it was in high school that I wasn't excited by fast cars, or I didn't crave a management position, or I (no, this doesn't make me a Marty Stu) wasn't as eager to bash people not in Honors courses. Or maybe I enjoyed certain odd math problems instead of the ones that made chemistry or physics clear to you. Or, like the puppet, I tended to have less endurance for conversations.

This sort of thing persisted into adulthood, with the constant "well, you can make compromises, can't you?" But of course the benevolent (as the author says) hand also restricts you. Perhaps you are in a company where the pay is good enough and it's not as conformist as the next place--really, you could do worse--but you want more, and you're not willing to go home and play MMORPGs with the same crowd you work with. Or you might find an Internet community where you fit pretty well but they can't satisfy a certain part of you, and perhaps you could be more convival or popular if you said certain things, but you couldn't and didn't. (I am thinking about past communities, maybe where others enjoyed retro games, but some people were just annoying. Not the current one! I mean, to the extent that no one community should be enough for us, yes. But this review isn't a manifesto.)

So this sort of thing is appreciated, and if people really shouldn't appropriate it all for ourselves, we can definitely go back to the well and get more inspiration from it. We should have many such sources, and they should go beyond arguments like "you're too good for those bums" or "you're not totally weird, so you deserve something, I guess."

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A Walk on the Beach, by Bruhstin

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
"Winning" is not the main thing here, August 29, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

Count me among the people who think Tarot cards are nonsense. Perhaps even having a game where you try and find meaning from them is nonsense. I remember storming through Fool's Errand blissfully unaware of what the Tarot was. That was enough for me -- bringing out all sorts of weird things to figure out and achieve.

And yet, if something doesn't try to suck you in too far to mysticism, it can work quite well. The 500 word limit for Neo Twiny Jam seems to work well, so an author doesn't try anything crazy. There are three cards to choose from, and you eventually choose all three. The order doesn't seem to matter. Each one sends you through a surreal adventure where the choice is to have fun, or give up and not have fun. You can guess which is right. This isn't to bash AWotB as "oh, a kid could figure it out," but it makes for easy replay to explore all the paths you want to. There's certainly a feeling of "oh, can I do anything weird and supernatural here?" And with each of the three choices, you do.

There are two endings, a wholly healing one and a reflecting one. It's a smooth experience, and the Unsplash photos add to the effect. I was left wanting more, all while well aware that when stuff like this gets too long, it may go in for mysticism.

AWotB also keeps your own life and worries, and why you went to a friend for a tarot reading, as a generality. Perhaps this was due to the word count, or perhaps it was a sly dig at how many people who dish out Tarot cards speak, themselves, in generalities. That said, given that I wasn't looking too hard for help, it was a neat journey, and after I played it, I felt up to doing some annoying tasks I'd been putting off. So it served its purpose, in its own way, perhaps because I wasn't looking too hard for anything. This may not be related to mysticism but more to just remembering to lett your mind wander a bit and not pressing too hard, or taking a break from Internet sites whose business model is wasting your time and draining your energy.

Whichever, it's quite nice.

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The Last Mountain, by Dee Cooke

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
ParserComp entry has choice-game feel, in a good way, August 28, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: ParserComp 2023

In The Last Mountain, you are on a multi-day mountain race with a friend, Susan, whom you've raced with before. You're doing pretty well. You might get a medal, which would be a first. But she's a bit exhausted midway through.

This immediately brings up a dilemma, as she says you should go on without her. But you can't. With the races you've run together before, it feels wrong. You can't read her mind, so you don't know what she really wants to do. And from here, there is a trade-off. She will slow you down. And some paths give adventures and realizations and accomplishments that others don't. (There's also a way to get lost!)

In essence, there are three main choices to make. This allows for eight endings. Some are similar, and some are different. I was aware of the walkthrough the author provided, and I planned to lawnmower through when I played it in-comp, but I didn't. It reminded me of other things, from a noncompetitive hike at summer camp where I and a friend started late but wound up getting to the destination first, to other challenges. This might be learning a programming language or getting through a computer game. Or, well, reviewing all the ParserComp games but getting distracted. Or maybe just reading a bunch of books in a short period of time, before they are due back at the library.

Or, one special in my case, writing X bytes a week to my weekly file. It's only a number, but all the same, it establishes something. That I've put in work and focus. And there's always the motivation to do more next week if I can, but that would break me, and I couldn't share my work or see what others are writing. It's a similar dilemma of "try for a medal or help a friend finish before the DNF (did not finish) cutoff." For me writing feels like something I can't give up, whether it's code for a new adventure or IFDB writing or maybe, one day, NaNoWriMo.

I got a lot out of the first endings, as I got the expected sliding scale from helping Susan versus achieving a personal goal. But as I played through them all, one noted that you gave up on racing for a while and came back to it. And it reminded me of other things I'd come back to, not needing to win it, and not needing to be super social. One of the big ones is/was chess, and hitting a certain rating. You want to do stuff by yourself, and you can probably hit a certain rating if you play a lot, but even if you get there, it might not feel good if you are playing to win. How you win matters. And breaking a new personal best rating feels much better if I win a good game instead of winning on time forfeit in a lost position. If I devoted myself too much to chess, I would ignore other things important to me, including sharing writing, even if it is not super-social. But TLM reminded me I still have goals to share, and they are worth sharing, even if I never reach the ratings stretch goals I once had.

Though the two entries that placed above it were deserving winners, TLM might be my favorite from the classic section of this comp, because it touches on issues of fulfillment in a subject and pastime I didn't know much about, but I can relate to it more.

The two above it were more swashbuckling and had flashier or cuter details, along with more humor, but TLM felt to me like it had more individuality, and it was the first of the three I replayed. It reminded me of the real-life adventures I wanted to take and maybe had given up on. It feels more like a choice-based or Twine game, with a relatively fixed plot and relatively few side rooms or things to examine. (You're tired. You don't have time for that!) And it could definitely be remade as one. But perhaps that wouldn't capture the essence of a mountain race as well, if you could just speed-click through. I mean, it doesn't slow you down with deliberate nuisances and annoyances, but the parser has a whole "don't sprint through this" feel which meshes clearly with what you're doing in the game.

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Clarence Street, 14., by manonamora

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Lost in the shuffle with all the Neo Twiny Jam late entries, August 28, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

Near the end of Neo Twiny Jam, a lot of people submitted games, and my goal of reviewing half the games before the end went kaput. On balance, this is a good thing. More to review later. But given my goals, it felt like I had something taken away from me, even though I really hoped to see as many entries as possible.

Clarence Street, 14 was one of those. In fact, it seems to be bit hard by coming in before the final wave, so if you look at games submitted by reverse date, it's not easy to see. But the title intrigued me.

You see, the title gives more mystery for an American reader, since we don't have very many addresses here under 100. The most notable exception I remember is in the Chicago Loop, at State and Madison, which is officially the zero north and west point. As you go further north, Lake Michigan moves west. Until then, posh stores give way to mansions, which give way to a park. And of course 10 Downing Street is a famous foreign address.

So the story had a good bit of mystery from me just reading the title. And it kept up through, for 500 words. What is it? What is the character doing there? And why? This is revealed at the end.

I liked how the tension built, and I liked how things seemed legitimately different after the reveal, which felt more than fair and logical. I saw the character in a different light, definitely. In fact I liked this better than Collision, which got a lot of deserved nice comments, because the surprise twist here felt a bit more real. They are both worth it. (The author had a third entry, too!) It certainly makes me want to work through other late entries to make sure I didn't miss anything else really good.

Semi-spoiler with meta-thoughts: (Spoiler - click to show)the character has gotten lost in the shuffle, like the game with all the other Neo Twiny entries. I won't say much more.

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vanitas, by sweetfish

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Of the bad old days, and bad current days, of social media, August 28, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

For me if something is going to be linear and use effects, it either needs a buildup or payoff. And in vanitas it has both.

You can see where it's going pretty quickly. Two friends more or less stay in touch as the dominant social platform changes. They discuss how nice things were, well sort of, while also realizing how bad it was. (False nostalgia is touched on quickly and effectively.) You may or may not recognize each individual site as you hit space and go through various conversations.

The ending, which is very much worth it, seems meant to be open for interpretation. It's creative and lampshaded a bit. It certainly made me think of how exciting it must have been for my parents or grandparents to be using the telephone more regularly, maybe complaining about how people can listen in, or how the phone monopolies are ruining everything. It reminded me of a whole bunch of nuisances, such as busy signals with no answering machines available. And that is the unemotional side.

vanitas is not a very tangly game. You can just hit space a bunch, then tab your way to open the next social media site. But it's effectively done, and the aesthetics are not there to show off, and the final two scenes are definitely worth your time. I recommend just poking around to bulldoze through rather than noting this spoiler, but since we only have so much time, (Spoiler - click to show)the final two scenes look into communication into the past and are deliberately obscure, as people's complaints about Zuckerberg or Musk may seem 100 years from now.

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Dimensions Guardians: The Typewriter, by Jackson The Bear

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Obsolescence doesn't make typewriters any less scary, August 28, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

This was a relatively quick Neo Twiny Jam entry without too many choices, but what were there were quite funny. A lot of details aren't filled in--you've warped to some odd reality to track down someone who's, well, been warping through realities too much. How strong their essence is, you don't know. They only give cursory excuses. It's unclear whether they're evil or ignorant.

That said, you have a job to do, and there's some mystery as to if anyone is at the typewriter.

The ends are abrupt, and that works for NTJ, because they needed to restrict the word count and also provide a few passages through, and because it's about the apocalypse. I also enjoyed the detail of a portal folding into your pocket--it's good surreal stuff presented quickly.

Despite giving relatively few branches, DGtT got me thinking of what its universe was, how it was built, and so forth. I enjoyed it on its own, and making up my own backstory, which seems to me proof the author used their words well. But I would still enjoy reading how the author themselves would've expounded on it.

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letters to a friend, by lazyguppy

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Taking out the trash, with a side-dish of hope, August 28, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

Bitsy has been a very valuable defense against having too much angst at once from a game. For me it reinforces that the game is not trying to crush you with detail. It says, I'm trying to paint with relatively broad strokes with these pixels, and you may fill the details in, if you wish. And so I do, much more than with much slicker productions. Perhaps it also says, to someone who remembers GameBoys and GameBoy Colors, that there was more than just basic shoot-em-ups available there, and we can still find them.

That's not to say it invokes nostalgia, but it reminds me that progress needn't be just about higher graphical detail or more color or whatever. It reminds me of stuff I always wanted to do, of my own basic programming efforts to move someone around with a cursor and arrows on the Apple. And yet at the still at the same time it can still give a complete and small world.

Even if the world is, technically, only two rooms large, as in Letters To a Friend. That's more than okay. And the whole "my apartment and I'm lonely and maybe it's COVID" thing. But the apartment itself is kind of cheery, with a wardrobe and such. As you bounce into scenery, you note things like you haven't really needed to buy any clothes, but you really should take the recycling out, because this sort of stuff does pile up.

And that's the main thrust of the game. You haven't checked your mail from a while, and there are letters from a friend. The catch is, it's someone you don't know. And you figure they must be regular. It reminded me of emails I forgot to send back and emails I didn't receive back, and I promptly went out and wrote them. It ends on a positive note. (Though I'd have liked an ending screen instead of scrolling back to the top.)

Elitists may claim this sort of thing doesn't wash in the long run, but seeing a regular drip of efforts like this certainly make me want to try something in Bitsy. It's versatile and lets you say what you mean to say, without feeling you have to oversell it, and that hits me as an author and reader/player. The one-bit graphics give a certain charm that say "You know, I'd like this character to live in more than two rooms, nice as it is," even as another part of your brain might be horrified at the thought of living in two rooms for so long.

Bitsy seems to have a certain baseline and shell against really rough stuff--it's hard to do anything to gross anyone out--and LtaF goes well above that. Maybe the novelty of Bitsy will wear off for me, but then, when I first saw it, I thought it would wear off quite fast. It hasn't, because of efforts like this.

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500 Word Hotel Escape, by Kobato Games

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Oversleeping's the worst, man, August 23, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

500 Word Hotel Escape is about what you'd expect. It's not a huge hotel. But you overslept on the final day of vacation, and now it's locked, and your room is isolated. No easy way out.

It's not hard to lawnmower through, just searching everywhere, as you discover a key or two, as thankfully it's not all about finding keys. There is variety!

5WHE flipped the fears from the times in hotels I hoped I hadn't misplaced my key on their head--the point being you are busting out instead of in, and I found the ending to be lampshaded more than well enough. So there were nice little subversions.

I'm slightly bummed the author didn't slip in the other stuff they meant to. It feels like the writing could have been tightened up slightly, but then again, I found it tough to cut down my word count below 500. Perhaps some simple graphics would've helped, as a lot of the writing specifies directions e.g. "the window is behind." But this is technical quibbling. I think I'd enjoy seeing 1000 Word Hotel Escape to see what the author couldn't quite slip in.

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Concerto of Life 3rd Mvt., by Alby

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Hi, Tie, Bye, August 23, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

Well, you got three 500-word entries in the Neo Twiny Jam, and the moderators gave the author their blessing to write entries as sequels of each other and I think the author made a good choice here. Perhaps if too many authors tried this, I'd say "hey, come on, write very different stories," but it acted as a relatively strong baseline, not trying to be to fancy or evoke too many emotions, and the 500-word limits provided balance. It was a good introduction to NTJ for me. But it definitely had its mystery!

You see, I managed to bungle things and read the second part first. As a result, I certainly was left wondering whether there was a breakup or whether someone was dying. I actually leaned towards the breakup and wondered if the third part had reconciliation! And of course I wondered how they met, and the first part probably hit harder than if I'd read them in order.

However, it is about death impending. It's very smooth, and while the interactivity isn’t huge beyond putting in names and choosing a few locations, that doesn’t affect much for me. It is about, well, people finding each other and living a life together, and their hopes for the beyond.

Re-reading it I was amused to note how it seemed to incorporate fantasy tropes (going out on adventures) as feeling like, maybe, a high-paying job in the real world that required a lot of travel. This was unexpected. I also enjoyed the brief discussion of their one kid much different than them. One generally doesn't think of such things, or you suspect character classes stay in the family, even if you need one of each class to go on a quest.

A longer word count might've caused it all to get too maudlin. I’m glad the author used these entries the way they did. I think the results were different than they would have been for, say, a 1500-word limit jam. It all felt well-paced and balanced. While the maximum interactivity may be picking the passages up after a week away and trying a different one first, I indeed did so. I enjoyed sketching the lives of the letter writer and receiver together in my mind, filling in the holes.

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Just a normal Human, by glucosify

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
"How do you do, fellow normal homo sapiens?", August 23, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

Ah, fitting in. All sorts of works can be written on it. How to do so. How fitting in may actually be bad. How it was nice, but you need time to yourself. JaNH looks at this--I read the author's blurb, but on replaying, I forgot it came about after research on autism. Of course it's awful to laugh at others' attempts to blend in if they just, well, want to blend in. But when they're trying to infiltrate a social order to disrupt it later, we should feel free to go ahead.

This is a brief humorous explanation of humanoids trying to fit in to human culture. But there are so many ways they fail, despite having done extensive research. The names don’t sound right. And ... well, no matter how much research they do on blinking, it fails.

Blinking is so natural to us, yet we can’t explain it. We don’t even know we do it, and it’s painful to keep our eyes open.

There’s a neat trick where you click on an eye and it opens up more text. It provided some much-needed color, though having a whole box of eyes blinking seemed like overkill. (Don’t click the big eye at the bottom.)

However, everything else was pretty effective. It’s easy for me to say “yeah yeah another game about fitting in,” but this offered genuine humor. There’s a chance to fail as well.

One thing about writing about fitting in, though, is it can be danged if you do or don't. If it fits in too much with the existing literature, it doesn’t push the envelope. And if it tries too hard to be its own thing, well, it isn't even TRYING to fit in, amirite? This is where individuality comes in, and while I think JaNH's text effects were a bit overdone, I found it fits well in the jam without surrendering what makes it itself, despite being about, well, not fitting in.

A side thought on playing through: some groups I felt obliged to fit in, not because I wanted to, I never realized that some people were, in fact, acting at “being themselves” but imitating their favorite comedians or celebrities or actors from a movie or even book characters. They seemed natural at the time. But they had done a research of sorts, too, like the aliens in this story, and of course they couldn’t tell me how to fit in, because it would blow their cover and show them as not original!

Over the years I've moved from "I guess I have to fit in here or somewhere" or "if I can't fit in here, where do I fit in?" to worrying less about this sort of thing. JaNH captured my former fears without, well, making me captive to them.

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Chinese Family Dinner Moment, by Kastel

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A true-blue hard-core Single Choice Jam entrant, August 21, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: 2023 Single Choice Jam

The Single Choice Jam allowed for one actual choice of branches, with the rest being just pushing through with the equivalent of "next." That's not to say you had to put a choice of two or more paths in, though of course it'd be a risk to.

CFDM takes this risk and is, I think, successful. Perhaps you have little in common with the narrator. You're not a member of any group that's discriminated against. But it's still easy to understand their helplessness, as well as the final climax, which wasn't dramatic but I can see how it's something you might be dreading all evening.

The setting is a family dinner where banal things seem to be discussed. Except in context they are not banal and you have a right to feel very ugly listening to them. Family members are either negligent towards this or actively trying to make things more uncomfortable. It's not a very long dinner, thankfully for the reader, and it doesn't need to be to get the point across. The final bit hit home for me, as it forced the narrator to go along with the whole charade of normality one last time. I found it effective. I suspect most readers have been in the narrator's position before. The alternative seems to be that they have not, because they have created that sort of position for others, which is obviously worse.

This entry was written by someone looking to try Inform for the first time after showing they were handy with Twine and narrative things. It's neat to see this crossover on general principles, being someone who used these jams to look into Twine after learning Inform. And I think it adds a new perspective--based on other potential entrants' notes, I don't think the way through the game would've been something someone experienced with Inform would've gravitated to. It's relatively simple, but it hits a good spot between standard Inform verbs and what to do in this sort of situation.

Also, given the restrictions of the comp, it seemed like a great time to learn something new--"don't do too much," a general good idea for learning something new, is really baked into the comp rules. Plus you have a buffer or ready-made excuse if things don't work out. CFDM did not need one.

I've had a few painful family dinners of my own, with the whole "just sit through it" ethos. Sometimes it would be rehashed afterwards once guests left, with "perhaps you could have participated more, maybe next time, they'll think something is wrong." The author mentions they hadn't had such a dinner for three years due to COVID, which is a small mercy for all the bad things that happened, and I was grateful to be able to add their perspective at this sort of thing to my own. I can say "yikes" now without going into a tailspin, and I appreciated this from CFDM, and I hope the main character gets there sooner than I did.

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What They Don't Know, by alyshkalia

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Perspective gives enlightement, if not happiness, August 21, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: 2023 Single Choice Jam

What They Don't Know, as part of the Single Choice Jam, gives the player three options at the start: that of Lady Highchester, who controls the Highchester family fortune, or Chelle, her daughter, or Ara, daughter of the late vineyard keeper, recently brought in as an alternate heir. This bit is as ominous as it sounds: it all but says "I'm not saying you're not fully adequate, I'm just saying." The reader can see each of their stories and piece together what happens.

WTDK is a short, tidy piece, but it's rather discomfiting for all that, which given the content warnings seems like the intent. It's not overdone, though. You might say, who cares about rich people's struggles anyway? Usually not me. But we see nuances in the characters behavior. Shelly and Ara have grown to like each other, and they both wonder why Lady Highchester is doing this. Each would feel discomfort in leaving the other with less than she deserves.

I chose Lady Highchester's path last, and I think this would be the best way to get the most out of the story. She's the one with the power, after all, and I think it's most tense to see the reveal of what she is doing and why. There are unintended consequences.

On reading the three characters stories, it's pretty clear to me that Lady Highchester really had no chance of getting what she wanted, or seeing what she wanted, and her meddling was the sort of thing that messes up basic happiness for other people. Though she doesn't lash out, no response would really have been good enough for her. It reminded me of times I've been in friendships or in groups, where they might say, hey, this really is better than those old bums, right? Or even in an honors class where we don't associate with them there regular-class rabble. And I felt there was no good answer, or I would get nailed for being too enthusiastic or not enthusiastic enough. But of course nothing was ever enough.

That's a danger of having power and using it casually, of course. You use it, and any positive response you get, you don't know if people are really doing out of the goodness of the heart, even if you try to construct things that way is an experiment. Lady Highchester's power play is far more subtle than, say, the classic scene from Goodfellas where Joe Pesci's character says, "What, do you think I'm haha funny?" Or when Henry is applauded for not snitching, but of course there's still distrust throughout the crime syndicate. But it's tough to tell which hurts worse, if you're the target. Under-the-hood stuff leaves no immediate intense burn but lasts longer.

From the character sketches I suspected that Lady Highchester never really considered that her experiment might cause unwanted effects. And I think the author clearly showed this is not okay without moralizing. Or maybe I'm just glad to see the sort of thing that reminds me of unscrupulous people from my past who expected loyalty-just-because and had ways people could show it. I felt bad, being kind of a pushover and all, that I couldn't show said loyalty.

It's easy to reject or laugh at or be disgusted by loyalty oaths or hazing or whatever. The subtler things are, the trickier it is, because we all have moments where we want to test friends' loyalty, generally when we aren't at our best, and we can't isolate that variable, so to speak.

Of course, we similarly can't prove that this paradox is a thing, so when stories like this come by, it's as close as we can get, and it feels good enough. We see how and why Lady Highchester is wrong, and that helps us be okay with not liking our own Lady Highchesters as much as we should on paper.

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Zenith, by Hituro

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Grinding, accelerated, with story, August 19, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: 2023 Single Choice Jam

I have fond memories of grinding away in RPGs when I was much younger, but all the same, I don't want to do too much for that again. There are other goals. I'm no longer just grateful computer RPGs exist. Zenith is not a grinding RPG, or even close to one, but it brought back those memories. It helped remind me what I liked about them.

In Zenith, you simply climb up a mountain. The rooms you go through are designated at random, and sometimes in these rooms, you find special items. Then, at the top of the mountain, you have a chance to chase your real quest, to fly to the "real" tower. You can just take a cheap glider back down the mountain if you think you're not prepared enough, and the game gives you some idea of how far along you are. The penalty for failure is losing all your items. The more items you have, the better chances of success.

This usually takes several times, and at first, you're not sure how many items could be in the backpack. You only know how you feel based on the place where you're given a choice (fall or jump,) this being an entry in the Single Choice Jam. Eventually you'll get to where you're not getting new items. That's a clue jumping may be a good idea. It's not hard to go back up the tower, as you just mouse-wheel down and click the link at the bottom. I sped up, so things seemed to blend together for me, while I noticed the room descriptions themselves were generous, with the exits different. There's a paradox here, of course--you want to get back up the tower quickly, but go too quickly, and you have less hope of finding new items to help you make your jump!

So mechanically Zenith can be expressed as "just keep clicking until you have enough items," but that's really unfair. First, the writing is too good, and second, I became conscious of several things while playing, both related to play and not. One was that even during a short grind, my mind wandered a bit as I quickly said "hmm, give. Items. Now." But there were others, and you may think back to lyour own long-term can-I-or-can't-I because-it-is-there accomplishments you had.

My other goals were getting a certain rating on a chess website (did I study enough? Jumping might mean pulling an all-nighter and possibly failing and giving up on chess for two weeks.) There's more random stuff than you'd think there, based on opponents' relative strengths and openings and so forth.

There was also my city's bike-share program, where you can ride for free for 30 minutes between any two docking locations, but after that, you get a charge. So I had a goal of making it between two seemingly distant locations without having to dock and start another ride. I would get closer, and finally I could do it. There was that faith in the final leap, when I didn't need that alarm saying I'd been riding for 25 minutes, so I'd better dock soon..

I wound up playing Zenith a few times more than I anticipated, because first of all, there's a high score listed at the end, and I managed to mess things up and not put my name on. (I thought I had to hit enter, instead of ... as happened through the game ... clicking on "enter your name." The author kindly obliged me by adding a feature.) But even if they hadn't, I wouldn't have felt my time was wasted. Obviously you can overdo the description but it wasn't, here, and if the descriptions were dry, perhaps my mind would not have wandered so productively. Even if I didn't know the strategies and number-crunching, it still reminded me of other times I was pretty sure I got things right, and other times when I really should have been sure I got things right, but I didn't jump, because I was a bit scared of other things that didn't work out.

Zenith reminded me, too, oddly, of Dragon's Lair, where you had those three parallel trips through the castle before meeting the dragon. That was more deterministic, but the randomized bits still scrambled things well enough that replays were fun and surprising, and I felt like I was navigating the randomness, which I don't feel in real life sometimes. Or it could just be like building levels and items needed to win a boss fight, or even memorizing a poem ("Do I remember how all this links together?")

It's a tricky thing, writing something that efficiently condenses longer works without getting too brief, and everyone's sweet spot will vary. But it worked for me, and rather quickly. It's one of the few Single Choice games that used randomness, and I think it did so very effectively. It could be done in other contexts. For instance, you could have a "prepare for a marathon" game where all sorts of factors on the day of the race could affect things. But the choices would be hamstrung and maybe artificial. (Eat nutritious or not? Train too much, enough or too little? And so forth. How much are you willing to put work and social life aside? The choices feel artificial, stated so. You know what the game wants, so it feels like a loaded quiz.) Perhaps even having Zenith with "you can go left/right" would be artificial. The first time, after failing, it was neat to succeed. On replaying Zenith I had that faith the RNG would work out in my favor even after not getting items on an early trip through. And it reminded me of times I thought or hoped I'd tweaked life's RNG in my favor to get things done. But I also saw how, once I succeeded, I thought "I'd better not fail--I need X items!" (I encourage you to find what X is.) It was empowering and revealing in unexpected ways. I think this was probably the author's intent, since they avoided moralizing and such. It seems like it could help push you away from some mindless RPG-based game (say, on Facebook) to realize, no, THIS is what I really want, if I go look for it.

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Cat vs Villain, by Raccoon Raconteur

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Shockingly, you can't defeat the cat. You won't want to., August 17, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

Being a Cat Person, I'll play any game featuring a cat, especially if it's on the cover. And it's not just on the cover. It bounces around a bit in the game and on the screen, in line with how you the powerful villain just can't bring it to heel.

This one was submitted just before the deadline, and it's one of those very happy entries that feel more like the author spent a lot of time wondering if it was worth the bother, because maybe it was too silly, but perhaps all that time thinking pushed forth a few ideas that made something funny. Whatever the reason it snuck in, I'm glad it did!

I enjoyed the expressive white line drawings on black, too, which it reminded me of times cats were being slightly impossible and there was not much I could do about it, but of course there were good special memories and I was sort of bummed I didn't have a camera handy.

There are three endings and not many choices to get there, this being a Neo Twiny Jam submission. I enjoyed comparing them a lot, and I think you will, as well.

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My Name Is Soda, by Sarah Willson

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
For me, it was breakfast cereal, too, August 17, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: 2023 Single Choice Jam

If you got through the first pages of Recherche du Temps Perdu, you may remember Proust once talked about madeleine bringing back a bunch of memories. You may remember it even if you didn't. It's become one of those literary cliches.

Here it's root beer. Root beer, the poor neglected cousin of Coke and Pepsi, and I've always preferred it, too, and I suspect I have more brethern or sisters than could be polled. (I in fact made a far more flippant reference to it in Threediopolis. It made a tester laugh. I'm still proud of that.) But the root beer is sentient! It's hidden under a porch, and it'll bring back memories. Like the meat in Douglas Adams's Restaurant at the End of the Universe, it's okay with you digesting it. And yes, it's a bit unnerving, too, but it all makes sense. Sadly, this state will only last for twenty to forty minutes.

That's more than enough for a lot of memories for you-the-character, and it brought back memories for me as well. Memories of chugging one two-liter bottle too much while studying, or of a pop can with the Minnesota Golden Gophers logo and 1984 Big Ten schedule on it. Or maybe of leaving root beer so long in the fridge, proud of my restraint, it went flat. Memories of mixing root beer with different types of ice cream to make a root beer float. (Don't get me started on ice cream flavors. Seriously.) Heck, even Red Bull drunk once every two years brings back memories beyond "this is why I don't drink Red Bull."

The character has different memories, of course, combinations of happy and sad. Alcohol is briefly touched on without judgement from the root beer or narrator. As a teetotaler, I felt a bit superior, though.

I didn't once I had The Choice. What is it? Well, you can be selfish. I saved the game and took the selfish one first, then took the selfless one. I immediately rationalized that I could do what I knew from the selfless one once I went selfish, or it would have happened anyway. I'd like to think I would, in real life. But things probably don't quite work that way.

I think the final choice is strong and well-placed enough not to spoil here, and MNiS would have been well-done without it. I place a high value on games that let you think in your own way without being all "I'm making you think" or being too unstructured and general and MNiS hits that spot for me.

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Thicket, by Damon Stanley

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
When "it was all a dream" is not a cop-out, August 14, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: 2023 Single Choice Jam

Thicket certainly leaves an odd impression at first. There's a short sentence, where different fragments are underlined. You click on one, and then there's a "wake into the tower" link back. Clicking on enough (or the right ones) opens up more, until there's a full story on the hub page. Then you wake up for good, with a "wake into the tower" link on the main story page.

This seems relatively tidy, perhaps even pedestrian, but the links are to odd dreams, which frequently result in death, or in capitulating to dark forces. I found this effective, and it often reminded me of times I rolled over and kept having different dreams, or what seemed to be dreams within dreams, some of which I wanted to remember and some I didn't. Mine were about far mundaner things, but they still had the sense of dying just before I woke up, but -- well, describing my own here wouldn't be all that interesting. You know how it is.

The author tends to link up the sort of hot night where your air conditioner doesn't work with more fantastic settings, and if I didn't connect all the dots, I was at least able to flow with the writing, which I enjoyed. The stories are kept to a page in Twine Chapbook format, and they vary a lot.

A tip for lawnmowering through: as Thicket doesn't change the link colors once you visit them, you may wish to click on a link, then hit tab and enter once you're done reading, so you know the next link to click. The sentence fragments are somewhat related to the stories that launch, but the stories will be involving enough, you may forget where you were in the main sentence. Not that repeating any one passage is exactly punishment, but just a note for convenience.

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"I am inventing all this and it is about to disappear, but it does not”, by Dawn Sueoka

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
About thirst for more, like..., August 14, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: 2023 Single Choice Jam

"So, what is this work about?" is the first question people ask, if deciding to look at something. In the case of Iaia, well, I think the meaning is surreal and open to interpretation, not in the "the author was lazy and wanted to get something to the jam before the deadline" way (they made it by about a week) but in the "this is genuinely disturbing-in-a-good-way."

What happens is simply that you are walking along the street and reflecting on a very odd life and choices made. Which has been done before, but it pushed the Talking Heads' Once in a Lifetime into my head, and also, it had an epigraph from Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet, which I hadn't read, but based on what I saw here, I'm interested.

Given that this was for Single Choice Jam, there is a choice at the end, a surprisingly normal one, which makes sense. It's a good one to have after surreal reflection. I will keep it in spoiler tags, so if you want, you can have a quick play-through (there was some tension as to what the choice would be, and I don't want to ruin that,) but even the response is not what you'd expect.

Iaia has no back button, so you have a lot of text to re-scroll through first, but that's more than okay here (I just repeatedly hit tab and enter.) The first time through I wondered if some text was randomly generated, maybe because the author tried this trick before with Phenomena, and it worked well. But the images are deliberately chosen, and they feel well above "throw stuff at the wall."

So what is the choice? (Spoiler - click to show)You buy a drink at the vending machine. I like it a lot, because I think back to when I bought stuff at a vending machine, and I knew it was overpriced, but it looked very good. I was reminded of the vending machine in the high school social lounge, how I wanted to order one of each, and it would've been easy to do so if I planned things out, but I never did. The magic of vending machines died early for me, which is good for my pocketbook, I suppose, but I missed that. I was surprisingly disappointed on the first play through that (Spoiler - click to show)root beer was sold out, and it turns out it always was, but I still played through to buy root beer. It mattered to me much more than it should have, which on reflection was really, really neat.

Anyway, the next time I (Spoiler - click to show)drink root beer, I'll think of this game. Maybe I will even replay it at the same time. That'll, like, totally show it it can't stop me from doing what I want!

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Toast, by morgana

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
When the bread gets heated, it gets HEATED, August 13, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: 2023 Single Choice Jam

Toast is a funny little game in HTML5 (it has source code on GitHub, too, which I found educational) where, well, your choice is whether to make toast or not. It's quite attractive with its minimalism, which works well to assure you it doesn't expect you to find deep meaning.

You simply choose yes or no, and then you keep clicking. There's also the choice to click on the bread or the toaster, which gives you a funny little story that unwraps. It's all pretty surreal, of course, and I think it might be lesser if it were dragged out. It's the sort of effort that leaves you wanting more (in a good way,) because it's well done, but at the same time, you wouldn't see a way that *you* could extend the joke. Well, I couldn't. But I was glad to enjoy it and take it for what it was. It feels like something to replay between more serious entries.

I read this at a particularly odd time, having just made a lot of toast from bread that had been sitting out for a while. It provoked interesting thoughts in me, even though I knew it was deliberately surreal. You may or may not choose to eat toast before or after checking this out. Perhaps there would be a sequel where you eat toast at the computer, and weird things happen as crumbs get in the keyboard. Or maybe you drop the toast, and there is drama as you wonder if the buttered side will land up. I'd play either.

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Demon Hatching, by Mxelm

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Aggressive, neutral or passive, August 13, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: 2023 Single Choice Jam

Demon Hatching is a story-over-puzzle effort with three links in it at one critical point. You are, unsurprisingly, a demon who hatches in a forest, and you run up against a human much bigger than you are. You have three choices, to run away, to fight or to scream. Of course, there's a bit of buildup beforehand, describing what you are and what you are doing there, and at least part of what you want and fear and so forth.

The narrative breaks make it so that nothing is spoiled, and you get to see the story unfold at a good place. It's well worth it to cycle back and try in the other options to get a better character sketch of the main character and the human.

Ink games do seem to have that little something extra focused on the craft of writing, and that was evidenced here, and it certainly made me interested enough to try and follow the Tumblr snippet it mentioned it was based on. I can certainly see it evolving into something larger, and I'd be interested in that, too.

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If You Had One Shot, by Wade Clarke, Victor Gijsbers, Hanon Ondricek, Brian Rushton

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Really. You only have one shot. If you're honest!, August 13, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: 2023 Single Choice Jam

If You Had One Shot is an ideal entry in the Single Choice Jam. The jam allows for one actual choice but as many click-throughs as you want. It hoses all the parser commands, even EXAMINE-ing, for four directions. You are about to give a speech at your brother's wedding, and all four choices are drastically different.

But here's the problem: you pick one, and you try to restart, and you're not back at the wedding. Whichever direction you pick, you get an immediate story. Then on resetting, you look back at what you did after some time.

This is one of those efforts that definitely should be done, and of course it can't be done too much. It's an effective gimmick, and the writing is good, as you'd expect, since everyone writing has won or been nominated for an XYZZY award. Maybe multiple ones? But they're all well-known. I have my guesses, but I don't want to share them, because guessing is part of the fun, and I don't want to spoil my reasoning, right or wrong. Who wrote each piece is not obvious.

Yes, I did find a way around the "only one ending" bit, but it's an entertaining concept well-executed, one that might not have popped up so quickly without the jam. Each wrong way builds into a story as well.

As for how I got around? I won't spoil it. I think it's reasonable to expect the player who really wants to see them to do a bit of legwork. So it's neat to have something quick and satisfying like this that retains a bit of mystery.

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Four Days of Summer, by David Welbourn
A very seasonal good time, July 25, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Four Days of Summer is a funny little game. I'm glad David Welbourn wrote it and sorry I missed it earlier. It's not very big, and it has loads of meta-humor and hat-tips to other games, including Humbug by Graham Cluley, which I hadn't heard of yet. Humbug's a big enough game that this isn't really a spoiler. And it's very consistent that David's game would hat-tip other games, what with all the maps and walkthroughs he's written.

The first part whisks you through some surreal places where you just have to figure one semi-obvious thing. It's kind of hard to mess up, though there are some old reliable gags in there.

Your friend, David, is about as fourth-wallish as a narrator can get, as he provides you with weird items he inexplicably finds. They wind up being useful. It's all tied together with a potato peeler you find at the end. No, really!

I admit I was slightly misled by the cover, which left me scrambling and looking for a green item I didn't need. It is available, but it's a bit of an easter egg. (Also, I was hoping for some partial solutions with the flags. You could make (Spoiler - click to show)Canada's flag or, with the green, (Spoiler - click to show)Mexico's flag. But hey, it's Speed-IF!

And for Speed-IF it's extremely tidy and fulfilling and holds out the promise of a very interesting mechanic worth developing, whether in FDoS's world or, perhaps, another author's completely different one. If you're an author looking for an idea, once you see the idea, you'll realize there must certainly be many ways to riff on it or extend it.

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Between the Lines of Fire, by paravaariar

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Petty thievery, or is it?, July 24, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: ParserComp 2023

I wanted to try to avoid reviewing ParserComp games during the judging period, but I wanted to make exceptions for works people might miss out on and be sorry they did, due to the subject matter or an unfamiliar author.

In BtLoF's case, we have both, although I should note the author has written in non-English works that seem to have been well-received. (I onl researched this after playing through.) Nevertheless, I was sort of dreading looking into it, because it was about war, and I worried it might drag on, to show war drags on, and it might have more description than I wanted.

Well, I was totally wrong on both counts. It's a relatively short affair, and there are a lot of ways to get killed, and perhaps it would be better that way if you did. There certainly is something awful at the center of it. In the introduction, you know you're going to die. You're not sure how. BtLoF lets you know your protagonist's death is not very noble, and they're cowardly, too. He tries to get the bare minimum of bravery so he won't be found out. All this is done without pointing the finger.

Here's where things are tough for me as a reviewer. I don't want to spoil to much, but you steal something very particular, and it seems both very valuable and not valuable at all. It relates to some things I've seen. But it recalled upsetting moments for me, where I thought "Oh, I have no right to be THAT mad." But I did, because even if nobody stole my soul or wound up leaving me to die, they crossed some boundaries, under pretenses that Things Were Tough and There are Worse People Out There, You Know.

The final chapter is a fitting climax, as perhaps the narrator overestimates how much his fellow soldiers understand what he is trying to do, and it makes for a Tell-Tale Heart kind of moment.

I'll put why I found BtLoF powerful in a spoiler, and it's an oblique spoiler, too, just so if you read it, BtLoF should still have impact. It's not very long. You shouldn't have much problem with the four or five commands needed to pass each chapter. The story drew me in, allowing my character survival, wondering if he wasn't that bad, then slowly realizing that, yes, he was pretty bad indeed, or worse.

(Spoiler - click to show)it reminded me of people who told my story as if it was their own, maybe even interrupting mine to say "See? I told you so! That's what I've been talking about!" (Whom and what they told so is unclear.) Perhaps they even ascribe motives to me, or to antagonists or friends in my story, that weren't there, or deliberately emphasizing points I didn't care about. Perhaps those motives were flattering, or not. But it was my story, and someone corrupted it, by overplaying and underplaying certain aspects, and perhaps it was one I wasn't even ready to tell at all. It reminded me of people who told George Carlin jokes without noting, hey, this was by George Carlin, and they seemed much smarter than they were. There's a sort of spiritual robbery here, though in BtLoF, there's a bit of "what's the matter? They're dead anyway!" And I found myself trying to protest that and failing early on and even remembering when I'd warped others' stories, aloud or in my own mind.

BtLoF could have been done with a supernatural background, or as a slice-of-life game. Other works have done this, and successfully, in both long and short form. But it's a war story I hadn't read before, and I don't think that speaks to my blind spots. There are plenty of stories of ghosts on the battlefield, or of innocent people killed, in war. This is different. It was surprisingly personal to me without, well, being as invasive as the main character.

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Cheree: Remembering My Murder, by Robert Goodwin

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Help a 100-/16-year-old spirit find peace and closure, July 11, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: ParserComp 2023

Cheree: Remembering My Murder is definitely something I want to give a boost to during ParserComp. It's got AI-based dialogue, and the interface may scare some people away. And some may find it a bit long. I was able to get through it in one sitting, perhaps slightly guilty I'd dropped the ball on actually testing it when the author asked. (It wound up getting tested more than well enough!)

It feels like the sort of entry a lot of people want to play, but they never quite make time to, as there are risks it might be too unpleasant. But it navigates several flavors of unpleasantness well for me. I wound up playing it twice over one weekend. I'd like to explain fully why, but at the same time, I don't really want to spoil anything that might lessen the impact of the ending.

It's not the author's first try at this. It's similar to their first, Thanatophobia, where someone comes to you with a recurring image they just can't work out, and you talk it through. Here it seems more accidental and less clinical--you haven't met Cheree before, and she's actually trying to remember huge chunks she just forgot. And, oh yes, she's a ghost who was murdered in 1891, at the age of 16. But in each case, you talk with the AI to try to get to know them, as they look back and try to understand their life.

And before I go further, I want to offer a spoiler as to what CRMM is not, as certain possibilities may open up early on that stop people from playing: (Spoiler - click to show)there are no major crimes other than murder.

Cheree's rather more emotional than her predecessor--while you have the option to just hit return and plow all the way through, that changes her mood to misunderstood or neglected. So there's a bit of humoring her. Which is understandable, given you're talking to a 16-year-old. It was tough for me to make small talk, because I'm not good at that in real life, but it's kind of odd. Going through those motions, it was actually a boost to go and (re-)touch base with some other people, or just ask for things I hadn't. She has a lot of questions, which isn't really surprising for someone her age, but it is surprising that she wasn't able to answer them by, say, visiting her family. Of course, she can't, any more, and the more you learn about them, the more you see they were insular without being particularly close.

So how does this mix with the supernatural stuff? That's a rail I don't want to touch without spoiler tags, but it's pretty clear that being dead has given Cheree a certain amount of freedom. She is able to Astravel any place she wants, which simply means to teleport anywhere on Earth and give you an image of what is there. You can't touch anything, but you can and should ask questions. Ask the right one, and a trust bar on the right goes up. Ask enough, and in the right places, Cheree realizes a clue. It's actually a cipher, which might seem like busy work. But I found that busy work to be emotional relief and something easy to solve. The UI is neat--you can use arrows and just type the letter. And often you'll have recently been discussing one proper noun (a person or place name) or just a very long word, which gives you a great key to get started. These seem to get shorter with each clue, which makes for a difficulty curve. This is the sort of puzzle that's easy to find or generate now on the Internet, but it must have seemed very novel indeed back in 1890, so it makes sense Cheree is clueless about it. Also, she can't exactly use pen and paper!

There are four such clues to open up the main game, and they appear quickly, within the first ten locations or so. Then there are five more. They appear somewhere among forty more locations. You don't have to visit them all, and you may be able to guess which are most likely to have a clue. For instance, Cheree has never been to the Great Barrier Reef, so you can use process of elimination there. Sometimes she opens up a few new areas that don't give clues. But I think this is reasonable--often when I try to remember something, I can't work too hard at it, and I need to take a step back. But I don't know where. So I shuffle through some more pleasant memories and maybe even sleep on it. At one point on replay, I wound up hitting my head where I knew there was a clue--and taking my own break helped me. (I saw it quickly once I had Cheree astravel away and back, which reset the prompts she gave me. But, in a way, this dead-end sort of justified why Cheree took me all sorts of places and reminded me it can be futile to run into a wall trying to remember stuff.)

Cheree doesn't seem to have sleep. She's certainly trying hard to impress you, though. Nothing skeevy, just -- hey, would you like to see the Alps? The Rocky Mountains? A waterfall on the Argentina/Brazil border? So you have to filter through what she wants to see for its own sake and what might provide clues, and you need to humor her and her trivia questions and her small talk, and after a bit you gain her confidence. This sounds harsh on her, though to be fair, the scenarios are interesting and it fits her character well. She never got the chance to see much, and often when she brings up something from her past, there's a reason she does and doesn't want to be there. For instance, the place where she grew up is overrun with wildlife, now. Then you find where they left her body.

And seeing places from when she was alive, you realize her parents certainly never prepared her for anything approaching a normal life. Her mother was a medium, and she has the gift, too, maybe even stronger than her mother. Her father disapproved of that stuff, and he only beat Cheree when he was angry. (This was not a red flag in the nineteenth century.) There's one place in Wales where Cheree astravels, to see a well-known medium. She and her mother went there and quickly came back, and she'd have liked to enjoy it more. Cheree seems to have a lot of euphoric recall, which was probably needed to keep her sane. Her father neglected her at best, and her mother railroaded her into a life she maybe didn't want. And her two older siblings seem a bit jealous of the attention she gets, even though said attention is empty. They go on to live longer, less abnormal lives. You visit where she was buried, and a tombstone mentioned she was just the sweetest person ever, though nobody told her that in life. You'd expect there to be a clue for how she died, but no. And, well, the full explanation can't exactly fit on a tombstone.

The middlegame may feel like it's not going anywhere for a while, and I admit I cheated a bit with some of Cheree's trivia questions to gain her trust without having to engage in too much small talk. She does feel a bit clingy, but that makes sense, and not just because of her family. She later notes that most ghosts transcend from her state after a year or two, but she hasn't, and she needs to fix something out of balance. The question is, what? That fits into the story title, and at one point she notes, either people fix their balance or they become devils. So she has motivation to search high and low for clues. Plus she is just a genuinely curious sixteen-year-old whose parents didn't exactly let her see the world.

Fortunately moving between places is pretty easy. You have a pull-down map and can even type in numbers of locations, so I just had a post-it note where I wrote down new numbers and crossed them off. I used several such modern conveniences I took for granted to help the ghost from before 1900, and it made me chuckle. The first time you play, you may just need to run through them all, but the second time, when you're better at saying what she wants to hear, it goes more smoothly. (I made the choice to replay once I realized that some things she said early on were, in fact, clues as to what would happen. So I had to balance the mechanics of empathy with getting stuff done. It felt a bit cold. I never wanted to be the sort of adult who absent-mindedly says "yes I see" all while making clear I'd heard that stuff before, but for a couple hours, well, I was. I remembered adults both well-intentioned and not who said "Hmm, I see" in the process. I hope I fell in the first group.) I also was left feeling a bit of emotional blackmail, once I learned she found it hard to say no to her parents, and I in turn found it hard to turn her down. Who else would say yes to her? This went outside the context of, hey, let's just try to get through all the games for ParserComp!

So there's a good deal of translating what Sheree says about her parents, and more precisely, what she leaves out. A seance goes wrong, and it wasn't until I completed the game that I realized her mother had been horribly negligent both then and after. Cheree was her meal ticket--her mother rubbed elbows with the police and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle! The Whitechapel murders are mentioned, but here, it's clear this is something different. And there's an argument between parents. The father, financially successful in business and detached and very religious (much like businesspeople who praise God more than you do, and that's why they're successful, right?) isn't home much, but that also feels like not much of a loss. The mother, who would prefer fame, and who even hangs around an initially charming police officer. And you suspect they frame the arguments not in terms of what Cheree wants and needs but in terms of what God says, or what each emotionally deserves. There's a theme of not being able to tell adults no. Cheree never explicitly says she was displeased with her gift, though she does mention friends who she grew away from because of it. So you sort of feel bad for her and play along with her games.

Oh, wait. I've left one person out. She has a friend, still alive, called Mel, who's a bit of a smart-aleck and the same age as her. How they tie together is interesting, but they both seem to find you very smart. The fawning's not too much and I never feel it is romantic (thank goodness) but it reminded me of people under eighteen who were quite impressed at what I had gotten used to doing. I remember on Roblox (Bee Swarm simulator) other players were quite sure I had a job. I must be OLD! Why, I might even be twenty-five! So I sort of felt that responsibility when people with less life experience placed trust in me. But Mel provides a foil to Cheree, as she's quite clearly pushed back more against her parents, and she also makes clever snarky comments about modern technology to confuse Cheree. (Heck, Wifi confused me when it came out!)

I blew off a lot of clues the first time through. But I had the chance to replay them with a clearer head, unlike Cheree. And it reminded me of how, well, in some situations where I was sixteen, I either put stuff off to the side, or just questioned if it really happened, or I just figured it was something natural. I even let people younger tell me it couldn't have happened like that! But I had people help me along the way, maybe someone who wrote a book, or even someone who made an off-hand comment or who pushed back on someone who was being a clever jerk. Or someone who fought for a social cause, especially/even if their personal lives were flawed.

CRMM reminds me a bit of GK Chesterton's story The Man Who Wasn't there. Certain parts of my life, I wondered about once, but then took for granted. Or I crossed some people off too quickly as potential bad actors. I never really noticed who was steering me towards a life. Not "drugs are cool, man," but over-caution or jealousy or whatever. I could picture them now, catching me playing something like CRMM, saying "What the hell are you doing with your life?" I've carried around a lot of their criticisms, ones they've forgotten about. Some have died. They're hardly evil incarnate, but it certainly hurts to remember one more thing they said which seems obviously wrong now that I assumed was true, especially if they quoted George Carlin's anti-authority rants. Even though I was smart back then, I let it slide. There was nothing illegal. Cheree, too, has taken certain things for granted, or feels they aren't worth mentioning, or she can't mention them. And so often like Cheree I had to go to some nice place and come back later. Mine are different than Cheree's. I'm fortunate to have a lot, and CRMM worked for me to revisit a few people. I realized I don't have 100 years to transcend and put them to the side, but I do have a lot of resources, and I hope I've used them.

There's a lot of spiritual stuff in CRMM, and you might wonder why it's there until you complete it. But I was able to relate a lot of the spiritual stuff to more concrete mundane things I'd seen in the world. I certainly had a lot of suspects by the end, and they weren't guilty, but they sure didn't help matters. It was far too easy for the antagonist to do what they did. I also thought about what my ghost might show people, where I'd go, where I'd like to astravel once money wasn't an issue. I remember feelings I didn't deserve to take a vacation to somewhere as dazzling as Cheree showed me, certainly not as much as certain people who were more gung-ho about life. But one of the big non-spoiler takeaways I have from CRMM is, there were people in CRMM who were not evil or close to it. But they sure as heck didn't stop it, and they didn't gain the self-awareness that they should, or could have, until it was too late.

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Steal 10 Treasures to Win This Game, by spaceflounder
Don't be fooled by the title. This has a lot new to show you!, July 10, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: ParserComp 2023

Self-aware games about looting castles and adventuring for its own sake and such are relatively common and generally do pretty well. Titles that pretend they didn't try, or at least you hope they are, but you're worried they actually didn't try. Some are forgotten, because they didn't try. Some, like Yet Another Game With a Dragon. Yon Astounding Castle (of Some Sort), obviously put effort into the title and wound up successful. Steal 10 Treasures quickly earned its way into their ranks, with the suggestion you're not a VERY heroic adventure, but it offers a new parser experience with the expected assortment of meta-humor and misdirections and efficient gags. My overall impression is that it should appeal to everyone: classic parser fans, people who don't like parsers, and people who are trying to learn parsers but don't want to have to memorize a bunch of commands.

S1T is the sort of game that puts its tongue in its cheek and keeps it there, all while being very intelligible. It's what I imagine the administrators of ParserComp hoped for 2023 when they created "freestyle" and "classic" divisions, and it paid off right away. I imagine the author felt very welcome to create this sort of work. Some of the one-letter commands step over themselves a bit, so there's a small learning curve, but the game's supposed to be a bit absurd, anyway, so it's easy to laugh off. For instance, P is push, but Y is pull, since P is taken and YANK works well enough. But then yell is B, for bawl. T is dedicated to turn, but the period sign is used for take, which I found really handy. C is climb, and V is conVerse. The arrow keys are used for compass directions (and there's a compass up top showing you which ways you can go,) since the letters need to be saved for other things, and it works terribly well, better than standard parsers where arrows are used to move around inside or between previous commands. Here, you don't need to tweak previous commands. There are even a few commands you pick up along the way once you found a few items. All are labeled in the help and thus eliminate guess-the-verb. So the parser organization feels like a huge success to me, with a small learning curve.

The plot is pretty self-explanatory. There is a castle (33 rooms, according to Trizbort) with 10 treasures. Some are hidden. Some are in plain sight, but you can't take them right away because you need a special tool. The first one I saw seemed way too heavy to carry, but the game's internal logic shortly rendered that worry moot. There are all the elements you'd expect for an adventure, with monsters and things that can kill you: a dragon, of course, and a griffin who gives you a trivial riddle you can't solve on your own, even though you've (quickly) tried all the reasonable guesses. Oh, there is a maze, too. Of course, this being the 2020s, you don't have to actually map it out. Once I saw the solution, I was surprised no other game had thought of it before. I was amused at the overconfidence the game makes you feel with the most direct try. Then it pulls the rug from under you. Then--oh, THAT's what you do.

But if S1T was just about meta jokes, it would just be a moderately fun corny time. The puzzles are legitimately interesting, where you have something in one room that affects another. And you have an NPC you must rescue who helps you later. It's pretty clear how, and even when he does, the conversation that ensues would actually be kind of annoying in real life. The author keeps that bit short, and it works.

Perhaps the most memorable bit for me is a puzzle that might feel like busy work, if it were thrown in with too many others, but because it is part of the game with a lot of quick jokes, it's a neat abstract exercise, and you feel smart doing it, even if you don't have to do any huge calculations. It reminds me of another Infocom classic game, but it's good enough that I don't want to spoil it. You'll know which one once you play it, and you find the treasure. It's technically impressive enough that we can picture the author thinking, hey, should I show off a bit like this, and the answer is, yes, they should have. The misdirection here is that the maze is quick to go through, but this is more involved. Yet at the same time, there's little or no painful trial and error.

Though some of the puzzles do force you to say, "can I really trust the author?" One such example is an NPC you can't defeat by yourself. At first I assumed I couldn't get past it, and attacking it meant death, so when I ran out of stuff to do, I thought "hmm, I'd like a funny instadeath." And I walked right past! Though actually there was nothing behind it, used to defeat it.

S1T also sands a lot of details down. I'd also like to give the author credit for what was a really nice soundtrack. I'm not a fan of soundtracks, usually, but the music was, well, sort of like elevator music wants to be. It changes up. It reminds you not to take things too seriously. And when I was stuck on a puzzle, at least I had the music to listen to. It also has a very nice hint system, where you can ask with just one key push, and it pops up, saying there's nothing more to do here. And the clues themselves don't completely spoil anything. And I also enjoyed how directions were implemented, even if you couldn't go a certain place. For instance, if you don't go north to the castle in the forest at the start, The Game says, oh, come on, there's treasure ahead, don't think out! This is something that I always bug writers about when I am testing, because I think it's a really easy way to round out the world and author has built without going into detail, and too often the restrictions on what we can do make you feel small. Here, it opens up possibilities, or it just has several variations on the quote hey, doofus, stop walking into walls. "

One thing I may remember most about this game, though, is that the blurb mentioned some rooms, and I missed one of them the first time through, and even though I saw the game, I wanted to see that special room. I wound up doing so, because originally I had just said, okay, I'll get through the maze.

I played S1t the same weekend I played Cheree: Remembering my Murderer. I wound up replaying them both in short order. They are the biggest successes for the new "freestyle" group. They're two totally different games but really show how we can do more with the parser than what Infocom or Scott Adams could, with their 64k limitations. S1T pays homage to the old games and seems to note their shortcomings. CRM tries for much more wide-open stuff, with a more serious plot, and contrasting them makes me feel the administrators' decisions were a success. They're not for every writer to do, or try. In fact, most of us will never get close, and some may find the classic parser better shows the world we've created. But seeing two radically different works that break the mold renews my faith in the community being able to find these new ideas consistently. There must be more.

The author has found an interesting way to give the parser experience without having to hit your head over a lot of weird and abstruse commands. Perhaps there is latitude for having, maybe, two letters for a command. And the parser can work that out. I don't think that would have worked here, because it would have interrupted the pace of the jokes, but for a more serious tone and bigger game, it would be neat to have that autofill so that people could plow through. So I think this was a success both technically and creatively. It reminds me of the best skits or movies of Cheech and Chong, which don't seem VERY clever, because it's just two idiots arguing, right? But they know what works, and they know why those idiots are funny and show us more than "geez, people are idiots sometimes." They want their absurdism to make sense and not have lots of levels of abstraction, and they know when to play dumb. So does S1T.

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(almost eleven), by spacedfoxes

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
We've all had relationships like this. Why can't we learn quicker?, July 8, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

Works that mention certain things almost always invoke certain reactions in me. In this case, it’s a relationship that went on too long, for 11 years. I was wondering briefly if it was someone who turned 11 and felt they were too big for certain things, or even friends who found each other when they were almost 11 and broke up in adulthood, but – well, it’s 11 years of sort-of stability. And of being in and out. As happens with friends, because life happens. The interactivity is based around rumination about things that could've been done differently, or things we didn't notice until too late--or things we didn't notice

I’ve been sucker punched by people who told me I was lucky to have them in my life, not I, like the narrator, was being used for someone to lean on and then run away. There were people I was just glad they didn’t point out how unexciting I was. Or if they did, they provided ways to become more exciting!

But they never really asked me what I cared about. They just assumed their needs and wants were more important than mine. But they did come with a few superlatives, which it felt rude to turn down–before the next long rut. I felt I was ripping them off, since I could not offer superlatives back.

I took a while to realize these quasi-friends were in the way of what I wanted long-term, which was different from what they were pretty sure I wanted or should want, because friends help friends find what we really want, right? And of course some of them let me know I interfered with their long-term goals. Perhaps they implied they no longer had enough time for me, and my response was to do a complete reflexive 180 and make time for them to live, as kids these days say, rent-free in myhead.

And it cut another way, too. Some people, I wanted to be better friends with, but suggesting I'd be interested seemed an implication they were not that exciting. There are also some people whose lives I went in and out of because I figured they had enough friends, and it never struck me until recently that they may've thought I thought I could do better than them or felt brushed off. Then there are the people I haven't seen for, say, eleven years, wondering if I should've done better, or trying to place down a detail that makes me feel better about not wanting to be around them.

It’s tough to remember these things, but not so tough as it used to be. I have my own examples that parallel this work, and I wrote down a few more after. Some featured periods longer than eleven years, some less. "I took notes on this" seems like backhanded praise for an emotional piece, but to me it says, I experienced more or better than just an emotional spike.

The language in almost eleven is straightforward, but meaningful. The lack of melodrama works well enough, I’m worried this review may be way more melodramatic than its topic. But I hope this review is somewhere around as illuminating as almost eleven was to me.

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Palazzo Heist, by Julien Z / smwhr

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
The first part is entering safely!, July 8, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

Some games in the Neo Twiny Jam seemed like they might have had to leave something out due to the word count, and the authors did a good job of packing the right stuff in.

Palazzo Heist does that and more. It works both as a standalone puzzle and something greater, and of all the entries I played so far, this is the one I most can see and, maybe, want to see expanded into something much bigger. You may guess that 500 words is too much to describe a full heist, and you'd be right. It takes a bit of time explaining what you want to steal and why (not just riches.) Then it simply has you try to enter the palazzo.

It's a neat puzzle, with all concrete details and no knowledge of Venice needed. But it has misdirection which adds to the atmosphere without being unfair, and everything you need to know is pretty much contained in the description. It has the feel of a parser game where you need to examine everything. And I mean everything!

There’s also a way to sort-of fail that I found amusing. I didn’t try it at first, because I was trying to get through, but I was glad to expand the author's world a bit.

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Dreamscape CYOA, by Cerfeuil

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Well, I'd take any one of DCYOA's gifts, really, July 6, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

Looking at the relative popularity of items in the jam, this one slid way behind the other's work, *Eviscerate This Girl*. DCYOA seems a lot more my speed, and I'd like to encourage others to give it some love or thought, too, if you haven't. You could simplify it down to just choosing 3 tarot cards from a pack. Instead of double-edged, murky, stuff like Death or The Wheel, though, it's odd gifts like a Celestial Pillow, which helps with Lucid Dreaming. Or you can visit a paradise resort, but you have to pay for a room. Nothing practical or earth-shattering, but always fun. You choose three, then at the bottom, you click at the end, and said three cards are together.

It's interesting to re-read through and see which is the best fit, but I was amused by how I quickly said some at the top were the best, or if I was offered them take-it-or-leave-it, I wouldn't wait for the next ones. They were too good.

But at the bottom is a choice that might expose my reflexive gratitude as selfish. It's a choice that allows gifts for others. You are less powerful. It's double the height and width of the other cards--whether the author just wanted to leave relatively little white (well, dark here) space or kind of unsubtly point out what they feel is the best gift here, I certainly had a moment of reflection. I'd been slightly enchanted by the possibilities and then felt like a bit of a bum, nothing to ruin my day, but I realized that even with gifts that seemed benign (as opposed to the ones from a Djinni that cause bad things to happen elsewhere) I hadn't thought much of ramifications, or What Was Really Important, or I assumed my gifts could cover WWRI later.

So whether or not it was intended to be a psychological experiment, I found it to be an effective one.

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Curse of the Bat's Tomb, by fsi

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Small well-constructed adventure with a bit of horror, July 6, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

Neo Twiny Jam had a surprisingly large (to me) ratio of fantasy-quest games by authors, all of whom really seemed to know what they were doing. There've been a lot of works with emotional impact, too.

But this one combines both, while sneaking in under the maximum word count. I wasn't expecting what the curse was, and you probably won't, either.

Of course, given that it has some narrative, the tomb is not VERY big, or the quest VERY long. There's really only one puzzle and a few things to observe. It's a puzzle you can maybe guess, but said puzzle also has under a hundred states, so figuring an efficient brute-force method is a neat puzzle on its own.

It's a very clean effort, without extra fanfare, and I'm left with a clear feeling the author could (and should!) create something much bigger if they wanted. I'd also like to praise the cover art, which drew me in without grabbing me.

Finally, thanks to the author for including the source, and for telling us to experience their game before looking at it. It's in chapbook, and I used sugarcube in the jam, but several things still made immediate sense to me.

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piele, by Kit Riemer

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
It's not in English, at first!, July 6, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

Piele is a work that probably isn't intended to make sense the first time through, but it was rewarding to make sense out of and figure what was going on. Even if I didn't already trust a work by Kit Reimer to Go Somewhere Interesting, it was pretty clear the confusion was 1) intentional and 2) added to the experience.

To overgeneralize, there's a small page text in a language you probably won't guess. I had fun doing so. It's not from a huge country, but not an obscure one either. The point is that you go through the process of deciphering stuff, not just translating, but understanding what the words mean. The writing is poetic in nature, with two poems of four lines each, and sometimes, when you click on it, the literal interpretations appear first before the translated ones do. So the meaning slowly pops up.

This feels like a work you should experience for yourself, as explanations or critiques on my part would either fall short or be just plain wrong. So I’m just going to mention that clicking on the ending twice kicks you to the end of the work, so avoid that if you want to see it all right away!

Hint for the language: (Spoiler - click to show)look at the accents. They are unique (AFAIK) to a reasonably-sized country. If you're stumped, (Spoiler - click to show)cut and paste and use Google Translate. I think it’s a good choice for what the author was (I think) trying to accomplish. And I think it was successful, and that’s why I’m only semi-revealing the spoilers.

One other thing that makes more sense after the first time through: (Spoiler - click to show)the cover art.

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Jacob's Body, by Carter X Gwertzman

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Upliftingly macabre, July 6, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

It's always good to see IFComp authors pop up somewhere else. Whether these people are publishing books or just clocking thousands of rep points on stack overflow, it's a reminder to me that while I enjoy having a corner of the internet, but I don't need to stay in a bubble. In fact, I should not.

The author wrote Flattened London for IFComp 2020 which was a combination of Flatland and Fallen London, and it was a pretty big and amusing parser game. Then for IFComp 2021, they wrote My Gender is a Fish in Twine. I thought it was an effective and succinct counter-measure to those who used gender pronouns as a joke, and it never got close to over-earnest crusading.

This is about a slightly supernatural cycle of life where someone's body is repurposed following death. It branches to three stories, then a conclusion. It has the odd effect of making, for a moment, (Spoiler - click to show)cannibalism seem almost natural, each small story in a way reminiscent of how I read Native Americans performed rituals after hunting certain animals for food and made sure not to waste as little as possible out of respect for the animal's life.

But in our brief glimpse into Jacob's world, even what is not used, is used. And what is not used to clear constructive purpose has its own use in a way. It makes a clear case for content warnings, but paradoxically, the stuff that causes them is potentially the most uplifting or hopeful.

I hope Carter Gwertzman is writing other stuff, too, outside of comps and jams. I'm pretty sure that is the case.

(Note: Manonamora's review mentions the first sentence, which left an impression on me, too. Maybe you as well.)

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alias, by nyassidy

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Drive-by harassment, high fantasy value, low ick quotiient, July 6, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

This is a short story that takes an idiom and turns it on its head effectively. That idiom is "may I have your name," except, well, it’s literal in this case. It’s hard not to feel a bit defensive about all this. You get some interesting deflecting responses. You shouldn’t have to say them.

I don’t think there's any way to do as the fairy asks. But it’s a really neat look at invasive, unwelcome questions and having one’s personal space breached in a way that doesn’t make me need to go wash my hands after.

They way it ended for me, I wondered if the fairy ever had any intentions of taking your name, or it just wanted to be annoying, like a low-key catcall. Maybe it had no power to do anything.

It’s an interesting clever twist on chance encounters where someone was rude to you for no reason at all and you are left wondering "what did I do" and wondering why you feel just a bit icky even if you can't put your finger on what the random passer-by did to annoy you.

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Please Don't Take This The Wrong Way, by Crosshollow

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A neat twisting of a potentially manipulative phrase, July 6, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

"Please don't take this the wrong way" can be said at least two ways: from a position of power, or not. It can act as a pre-emptive apology all polite listeners had better accept and, thus, let the speaker rattle on for longer than they really should. This sort of conversation is often laced with "no offense, but you know what your problem is?" or "I know I can be harsh sometimes, but people need to wake up and hear the TRUTH!" and other such gems. Or it can be legitimately confused, realizing you see something a certain way and don't want to look down on those who don't, and they don't even have to come over to your view.

The speaker in this interactive essay/poem is decidedly in the "not" category. They've probably heard the phrase a lot from more powerful and confident people, both those who want to help them, and those who don't. They have a pretty clear idea of what they want to say, but all the same, people do seem to take it the wrong way, or they offer pity or other things that don't help. Or they put more stock in certain actions than they should.

One of the key phrases revealed on clicking is "I just want people to listen sometimes." And this struck me: everyone wants someone to listen sometimes. For many non-autistic people, they know how to increase that sometimes until acquaintances find it hard to pull away, whether at the start of a conversation or after thirty minutes of yacking. Whil I can't speak for anyone autistic, they know they probably aren't good at it, and they see the facts, and that's all that needs to be said. But that makes people more squeamish than some narcissistic fool's endless blather about how they had to wait in line too long at the DMV, or something.

The essay itself has words or phrases you click, which let the user expound. If you're paying attention, you'll see roughly where it's going, that here is a person who just wants to be understood and really, clearly, does not deserve to have some "wise" adult pass off some rubbish like "to be understood, first you must seek to understand others" before, perhaps, saying they understand the speaker perfectly, and it ain't pretty.

I've met people who are able to laugh off self-destructive or self-impairing behaviors (a "happy drunk" is a relatively benign case here) and people who feel bad they can't fix things they want to. But there's also some unwritten rule many of us live by, in that if we see something wrong with ourselves or others, we should try and fix it. The narrator here has experienced do-gooders who followed that rule, in various degrees of good faith, and they don't help. Perhaps this can apply to those of us who are not very social but would like to be and fail, or even those who keep making the same programming mistakes over and over again. So I appreciate this work very much.

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One-Word Warlock, by Damon L. Wakes

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
The title has a *most* inapt acronym, July 5, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

So I'm the sort of person predisposed to like this author's sense of humor, kicking well-worn tropes when they're down in a sophisticated playing-dumb sort of way, but I think this will have mass appeal. It has pretty much everything needed to make you happy you (sort of) wasted time. Each passage and choice is, you see, one letter long. The actual quest (as I see it) mirrors a well-known fantasy book, but you get there your own way. There are lots of ways to fail. Of course, there is the "sleep in bed and do nothing" possibility. One of them has you marrying a dragon and having a kid. This might not work with long drawn-out passages, but it does here.

There are also audio clues of the “best” choice. Sometimes it's pretty obvious. The right choice is contained in what the voice (the author's, which is a nice touch) says. Other times you have to remember some tropes. But it's non-intrusive, and I very much enjoyed the reactions, especially to one that promoted inclusivity nicely without being preachy.

I'm one of those people who always felt bad that I didn't enjoy 500-page fantasy novels as much s I should have, what with everything to track and the descriptions of scenery which quite frankly got repetitive and tedious after a bit. That's not a problem here, with just 500 words. On the one hand, it's an exercise in efficiency, but on the other hand, it was oh so wonderful for the author to have packed in as many jokes as they did. I was just happy I got things under 500 words, and I was relieved to get rid of some of the more flabby sentences. The author did me one better.

I'll likely enjoy said novels even less now, maybe because OWW (which may be an inappropriate acronym, yet it could fit into a passage or a choice!) puts things to a much higher standard. I hope more people see and enjoy this. The author's work is always good and funny and enjoyable to me but this, to me, is a spike up from his usual high standards.

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the ride home, by cassian
A rite of passage that shouldn't be stressful but is, July 5, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

This one, I thought I'd written a review for during the jam! It was one I connected with, but it felt almost silly to write, or to remember fears from high school. And it suggests some fears are still very real, if not especially crippling. I knew what I wanted to say. But I did not. At least, for a while. I wasn't sure how much to share. But on replay, I had even more. So here goes.

You see, I went to a horrible four(?)-week driver's ed school the summer before my senior year. For many kids, learning to drive was exciting. But I had quite a lot of my mother saying how expensive insurance was, and how teen drivers had better shape up because they are careless, and so forth. It was a bit of a shock to me that some people enjoyed taking Drivers' Ed. That includes kids who would lower their grade-point, even with the easy A, because of the boost from honors and advanced placement classes! One other thing about Drivers' Ed: it was at the fourth floor in my high school. I never went up there as a student. So it held some mystery when I finally went back on an open house night, after having sold my own car because public transport was good enough. It wasn't that exciting when I got there, of course. But it was a reminder of other things I'd built up and not looked into.

My first instructor apparently spent a lot of time in nightclubs, and he'd yack on endlessly about it, so as not to put people on edge, apparently. The (very faulty) reasoning being that if we were being deluged by the subject of how interesting and outgoing he was, we couldn't feel fear!

This confused me, since drinking occurred a lot at nightclubs. And drinking and driving was bad. Suffice it to say that I did not need the negative reinforcements from certain driver's ed movies, the newspaper clippings on the wall of very sweet and lovable kids who screwed up, assuring me that I had better not drink and drive. All blissfully unaware I'd never even been to a party with alcohol at that point!

How does it relate to the work? Well, TRH's background music--well, it reminded me of those horrible driver's ed movies that tell you not to screw up or you'll endanger your lives and others. It establishes fear, but a totally different one than perhaps the drivers' ed movies want you to feel. It's a fear of understanding too well how you might screw up and not having the confidence to avoid that. It's a fear based in how you maybe aren't acclimated to how cars have safety feature, and the rules of the road--well, how to be a safe driver has a lot of precautions, and if you're paying enough attention, you'll catch things. Or you'll wind up getting close to a mistake, but not really, and if you're conscientious, you'll realize why people do certain things.

At some point, though, being over-cautious is too much. And I never had anyone address that until my nightclub-visiting instructor said "YOU ARE OBVIOUSLY TOO SCARED TO GO ANYWHERE WITH A HIGHER SPEED LIMIT." Between them and my parents--ouch.

And the parents in this reminded me of, well, my own. They know how to nitpick. They never suggest the simple truth, which is that you learn things fairly quickly if thrown into the melting pot. And ... well, having a kid drive at night for their second lesson is a really, really bad choice. There's more to remember, with turning on lights. It's harder to look for a stop sign, or for people not wearing reflective clothing or whatever. There is so much to process, but the parents failed to keep it simple.

So I see, intended by the author or not, two parents that threw the kid in the deep end and, conscious or not, had something prepared for the kid's inevitable failure, or almost-failure. And the kid certainly beats themselves up. There is more fear than there needs to be and a shocking lack of empathy from the parents, who don't outright tell the kid they're a flake but jump on small mistakes.

Oh, that combined with [spoiler]the kid realizing they could have hit two pedestrians not paying attention[/spoiler]. I empathize with the narrator, for being pushed into fear that drains them, trusting adults to plan and do things correctly, but the adults did not.

This is all very negative. My story had a happy ending--I had a second driving instructor later who said "just go ahead. I trust you." And it worked. The second instructor actually smoked in the car, and it did not bother me. I reacted favorably to his lack of "exciting" nightclub stories tinged with belief he should be an even bigger man when out on the town than he was. (Note: the first instructor did shut up, but I felt guilty that I was so distractable, he couldn't share the stories he wanted. Also, he is on Twitter now, and one of his most recent pictures features an odometer going up to 100 MPH, which is well over all speed limits.) I don't drive much now, but I feel confident I recall the basics quickly. It's the opposite of fear--competence without excitement.

This is a bit long-winded, but it's my own driver's ed story, so different from the average "I AM GETTING MY CAR!" But I hope it shows more growth and overcoming fear and how TRH brought that home but also reminded me I had progressed past certain fears. In a nutshell, what is a joyful rite of passage for most teens is extremely stressful, for the narrator. And they, unlike most "normal" kids, are unable to put small mistakes behind them, likely due to adults who needed to flex how with-it they were and others weren't. That's sad and terrible, even before the story's climax.

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Listen to the Phone Ring, by Rylie Eric

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Play the predecessor and it's very neat indeed, July 5, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

On its own, this is just a choice between whom to call, without a lot of data You have a conversation, then hang up. But paired together with a predecessor, a penny drops. It becomes more than a small vignette but a true story.

The predecessor is a cookie-clicker sort of game called Literally WatchPaint Dry. It's not the first boredom simulator and won't be the last. But it's a relatively quick one. And it uses the cookie clicker engine to relate a story with all the paint you watch dry. A friend turns away from you based on who you are, but another takes place. The implication is that there are some people you can watch paint dry with, and some people who were maybe exciting at first, or you did more exciting things with, but they were unfulfilling.

Perhaps this back-reference bends the rules of NTJ slightly. But I think this entry in Neo Twiny Jam can stand on its own. Pair it with LWPD, and you have something very nice indeed. It requires a certain confidence to call a game LWPD or, indeed, to refer back to it. That confidence is not arrogance, here.

I confess I used a keystroke-sender to get through LWPD. There is nothing beyond the first day and a half (129600 seconds to be precise) and it subverts the whole pointles clicking genre with something neat and emotionally rewarding. You see the backstory behind the friend who wants to be with you and the one who doesn't. You realize perhaps you were calling the old friend out of habit or misplaced loyalty.

It reminded me of a friend who I thought was okay watching paint dry with me. Then I figured I got too boring for him. But then I thought of what his ideas of excitement were, and I was glad I was boring that way.

LttPR lives up to its credo--it allows you to take it or leave it, even if it is different from the other entries in the jam (it is very plain, itself, but refers to previous non-text-based games, in this case one made from a graphic engine for a game originally meant to be mindless) or not being very interactive. It may, in fact, not be exciting. This is not because the author has a lack of creativity. But there are many efforts about far more oppressive circumstances that get the point across and may seem shinier and more praiseworthy. Many are. But LttPR focuses more on personal rejection and coping with it without drama and, in doing so, it is saying it's okay with what it is. This isn't a backhanded compliment, but I always enjoy works that don't have to be exciting to be creative or thought-provoking, especially if they help me recall certain negative things in a more constructive light. LttPR did that.

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Buck Rockford Heads West, by J. J. Guest

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Half existential longing, half gleefully abused Western tropes, June 29, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

If you worry Buck Rockford is too on-the-nose as a Western character name, fear not. This work is not fully in earnest. And Buck’s name works doubly for me. Why? Well, having lived in Chicago for a while, I know of a good-sized town about 90 miles west called ... Rockford! It is not a terribly romantic place to live, alas.

Buck Rockford Heads West (BRHW) is itself an effort written in Ink, where you, as Buck Rockford, have a choice of four professions to follow. Each is stereotypically Western, except for weird twists that happen once you start. In each profession, you may have a drastic life-or-death choice, except ... well, it only affects the story.

Each part of the story at first relies on standard Western tropes, and while Western tropes have been done and mocked enough to make me scream, this is different. There is no "howdy pardner" or long description of scenery. There is simply doing stuff wrong on purpose, which turns out to be way more interesting than doing it right. Here the enforced word count works well. Twists and turns are packed in nicely.

Eventually, Buck finds his destiny, which is sort of unexpected, but it makes sense given the surreal logic of the story. Strangely enough, I found it related to (Spoiler - click to show)Mr. Seguin's Goat, which I'd played a few weeks ago in ParserComp 2023, because of (Spoiler - click to show)the themes of having too much freedom not being so great. In fact, because of the nature of the story where one adventure does not help Buck on any of the others, we can either note that he is going around in circles with his four choices, or he does in fact find worse luck somewhere along the way. (It's possible there is a hidden ending for doing things the "right way." But BRHW doesn't feel like it wants to force to you. I played through several times to check.)

I was surprised how much I thought of it afterwards as more than just a bunch of clever jokes and misdirections. It reminded me of back when the World Wide Web was more volatile, and I thought I'd find a webpage where I'd stay longer than I did, or a community that should've worked, didn't. Some webpages seemed terribly avant-garde or clever, but they were just flashy, and once I heard the same old snark a few times, I moved on. Then on stumbling over a website from over a decade ago, it seemed old-hat, the "insightful" humor too cruel.

Similar things happen with art, of course--people loved Sasha Baron Cohen's Borat for different reasons. The parts that got the loudest laughs didn't seem to age well, and the odder parts, to me, showed profound insights. And Cohen himself keeps needing to try new characters or environs. Once his current alter-ego gets too popular, he needs to move on.

Neo Twiny Jam has its share of downright depressing works where someone is stuck. BRHW is about being stuck in its own way, but it has more a sense of melancholy, of searching for more. Perhaps not of discontent but of knowing you will kind of shrivel up and growing if you stay certain places too long. But it's told to you not by a self-help guru worth tens of millions of dollars, or even a teacher in high school who said you should be more interested in their subject than you were, because that's the way to a good job. But it's about looking into things you always meant to, a reminder of longing without saying, gee, pal, you wasted your life.

Well, that's what it was for me. You may find your own interpretation, and it would not be wrong. I have already yammered on so that this review eclipses the Neo Twiny Jam word limit. I think that says a lot.

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Midsummer's Eve, by Tristin Grizel Dean

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A chance to win a fun scavenger hunt if your 13 year old self never did, June 19, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: TALP 2023

I remember the author's Sentient Beings as one of the highlights of the first TALP jam. It's quite good, and if you're having withdrawal after finsihing this year's entries, you might want to go back and look at it. It's a scavenger hunt, like Midsummer's Eve, but there are fewer things to collect and more abstract puzzles. With SB, there's no doubt you'll get things done. You have 24 total specimens to find and can only carry 6 jars, so you can go back and forth a bit. There are a few verbs to guess, but they're hinted directly elsewhere. It's fun and cute and well done.

Midsummer's Eve is a lot less solitary, and you are a kid who vows to win your town's treasure hunt this year in a town full of magic. The treasure hunt features 12 clues, nicely laid out so that kids hunting for clues can find them and put them back or, in the case of one gift item, everyone gets one, because it's the sort of item kids like. The clues aren't strictly ordered, but you need tone to get another, sometimes. Clues 1-7 build to finding clues 8-12, each of which gives a piece of a passcode you tell to win. There are even other kids walking around, but you're way faster than they are. Still, you can ask them for clues! In fact they're cute in a clueless sort of way saying "I think you have to (X)." One was still struggling on solving zero clues when I had ten. I kind of felt mean pumping them repeatedly for clues, or maybe I was chuckling a bit inside at them, once again in touch with my inner ten-year-old. (For silly features, I think it would be cute to have a no-badgering difficulty level where you can't ask for too many hints at once!)

ME uses the Adventuron parser in interesting ways. You have to order specific food in some cases e.g. ORDER HAMBURGER WITH MUSTARD. The garnishes matter to find a few clues. There's not a lot you have to intuit, which is not surprising, because really abstract puzzles would be mean to thirteen year olds who just wanted a fun treasure hunt. And while some of this is, for the reductionist, just following instructions, it's all tied up in things like climbing mushrooms or interacting with a mythical beast. But there are also commoner pleasures such as riding a Ferris wheel or playing carnival games. These don't interest me-the-adult, but I really enjoyed being able to play along as a kid who thought they were wonderful or mysterious or whatever. Also, in a thoughtful fun twist, the specific food you order? Well, you can only carry one at a time, but you can just eat it and order something else. Everything is free. Yay! You literally have an excuse to eat until you're sick, or until you can't avoid being sick tomorrow. That's what festivals are for.

The graphics are all very good and add to the mystic feel. I read on the Adventuron server they were AI generated but given my attempts to create cover art with AI, it's a lot trickier than saying "Okay, draw a big picture with this that and the other." In fact I had a weird bit of discovery where one location appeared to be plain, but lo and behold, on revisiting it, the graphic actually loaded this time. It added to the whole magic feel. I usually knew to wait for Adventuron graphics to load, but my eagerness to explore and beat the other kids out betrayed me for a bit.

There's also a mystery intertwined into all this. I wound up restarting in order to actually get a transcript, and I solved the side quest (or a chunk of it) before finding the final clue I hadn't. But I had fun rolling through things and forgot to check off on the secret items. This speaks to replayability. And the layout is very nice beyond the graphics. You can either click on CLUES (to see the clues–as an adult, 12 clues is a lot to juggle) or MAP or just type those commands. You forget this sort of thing once you get used to it. I was also surprised you could mouse-click on the help menu. This isn't cutting-edge GUI for AAA game studios, but it's so welcome for independent games.

I really enjoyed my experience with ME and I suspect you will too. There are a lot of things that just felt right, such as a grouchy man distracting me from taking an item I needed, and I missed the obvious way to get around that for a bit. It has a good economy and balance for its rooms, too. By that, I mean that there's usually only one thing to do per room, so even if that last clue evades you, you can focus on rooms where you've done nothing yet and potentially even cross off ones where you have, and with the rooms mostly in a figure-eight, you never have to backtrack too far. The descriptions are robust enough that this process of elimination works and you shouldn't get bogged down, wherever you might get stuck. Also, the clues are ranked by ease of discovery, which is a nice gesture for both 13 year old kids and whoever is playing this game.

So it's a well-balanced game, and you need/get to do a lot of neat things to find all twelve clues. Oh, and you can't cheat and tell the answer right away, even if you know four of the pass-phrase's words and can guess the fifth.

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The Mystery of Winchester High, by Garry Francis
Risk expulsion, find school-saving treasure, June 19, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: TALP 2023

I've played a lot of Garry Francis's games and enjoyed them. They always seem to have a general crowd appeal to them, relying more on the interesting puzzles than the characters. For instance, Kenny Koala is a fun game worth checking out if you haven't, and all the animals you talk with are fun and add to the environment, but you don't do much with them besides give them items to make them happy. MoWH seems to pay a lot more attention to the characters. They go places or restrict you. Maybe he's done this and I forgot, because he's written a lot. But I think the whole conceit of MoWH is very appealing: you are Ian McKenzie, and you get kicked out of class, as 13-year-old boys do, and lo and behold! You have the school to yourself. A perfect time to find missing treasure that will make it financially stable. Especially since this time, your stunt might get you expelled, unless you have evidence of good behavior elsewhere.

I was a bit worried when I read MoWH's summary, because if there is a lot of treasure, then perhaps the school is necessarily very, very big. Which means the game might be exhausting. Maybe you are worried, too. But thankfully, in the spirit of TALP, it's under control. I lost track between 15 and 20 rooms, because I was able to hold it in my head, and it was pretty clear some rooms weren't useful. (That, and I checked with HINT, which is handy for making sure you're done somewhere. Perhaps for future authors, another command that tells only if you're done here would be even nicer. Cragne Manor had its coffee cup. But for a z5 game, this is great.) It still feels big enough to be a school, though. Just stuff like having one hundred lockers in a locker room and needing to find the right one (twice) and some general hallways and a service elevator makes enough to hack through for a satisfying adventure, but you're not going to get stuck anywhere.

And I really like that you spend more time with an NPC than usual in one of Garry's games–here a janitor moves around impressively for a PunyInform-sized game and gets a lot of attention without seeming too wise-old-father-figure. There's a small part where you have to go back to ask him for more help, and he gives it, and it was surprisingly hard for me, not because one shouldn't repeat things in adventure games or be expected to, but because Ian generally has caused trouble and doesn't need to bug the janitor, and there's another adult besides his teacher who impedes you slightly. The 13-year-old awkwardness comes through!

The puzzles? Well, they seem more straightforward than usual in Garry's games, and that's appropriate given this is a TALP entry. There are a lot of tropes. There are locked doors and drawers and an apparent dead end in a basement, with a secret passage behind a secret passage. In a way, it's been done. There's a safe, too, and finding the combination is strongly hinted. Amusingly, it's one piece of information you do remember from class, so it all makes sense. You won't have to break your brain.

I think MoWH did a good job of establishing tension despite a generous helping of tutorials and hints if you want them. And one thing it reminds me of, too: a lot of Garry's games rely on puzzles that experienced adventures may be acquainted with, and yet at the same time I haven't noticed a lot of repetition or overlap between games, which is impressive in a general sense.

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Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich: The Text Adventure, by Rex Mundane

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
After all that, don't forget the glass of milk to go with it!, June 19, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: TALP 2023

With an author name like Rex Mundane, and a well-worn situation such as making a sandwich, there are always a few worries. Has it been done before? Is it trying to be too wild and silly? Is it trying to be too "ha ha I wrote this in under 2 days so go easy on me there, pal?" There are all sorts of pitfalls, and so I walked into PJTA thinking, okay, maybe this will be straightforward. Or maybe it will go off on a tangent.

Or worse, it could be the sort of game that picks you apart for performing Every! Single! Step! to make a sandwich. I had this in sixth grade. There was stuff like taking off the lid and so forth and putting the knife in the peanut butter, and the teachers did all they could to show you it wasn't quite like that, or you missed a step. It was painful. Even though I enjoy proofreading and (on a good day) finding bugs in my own tricky code, this annoyed me terribly.

Thankfully it avoids the long list of instructions approach (yay!) and manages to combine straightforwardness and odd tangents well. It's a good fit for the Text Adventure Literacy Jam, because it combines the two well enough to make me laugh. It's not a huge game, and it's not super-ambitious, but I had forgotten I'd set my phone's alarm an hour before looking at it. It was for a cool-down timer for another Internet game I wanted to chip away at. When the alarm went off, I was most of the way through, and my reaction was "silly phone, I don't need to do that right now."

So I was engaged. PJTA hits the usual riffs on adventure games, but they're varied enough, and deep puzzles or plot aren't the main focus. It is a text adventure tutorial, and not just the one that tells you in detail how we wrangle parsers around here, then forces you to wrangle with said parser to gain street cred. It tells you more or less what you need to know, and when, except for a couple verbs you need to guess. Then, it gives more than adequate hints, including one with an NPC who yells at you irascibly until you get it. That was an unexpected humorous twist.

So you may guess making a sandwich isn't all there is to the game. I don't want to spoil it, not because it has a profound moment you'll be mad was spoiled, but because the author organized it with enough care that we could be surprised and laugh as we follow the shaggy-dog story. It's bigger than it seems, as you get out of your kitchen, and you visit your living quarters and beyond. Well beyond. There are many other elements you wouldn't expect, and maybe they are generic elements for fantasy adventures, but they're thrown together for comedic effect.

This is not the first text adventure to get all meta with relatively pleasant and silly jokes, and it won't be the last. In IFComp, people might be tired of this straightforward approach, or it might need a more detailed payoffs. But one pops up every few years. The last one that comes to mind is Mike Gillis's This Won't Make You Happy from IFComp 2020. The same level of meta-humor and story length but definitely very different stories! Also, I like how PJTA gives you a different item to find depending on which part of the sandwich you look for first. The puzzles seem the same, but it's a nice touch nonetheless.

It's pretty clear PJTA is winking at you to join in the joke and see where it goes. There's nothing profound, but TALJ 2023 would be lesser without it, and given that it was the first game I played, it was very welcoming indeed. And while on the one hand a story with emotional depth will almost certainly beat it for first place, it feels very much at home in TALJ.

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Priceless Vase Adventure, by Robert Szacki
ADL game with the usual amenities, June 19, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: TALP 2023

Priceless Vase Adventure (TALP), by Robert Szacki

This is a small ten-room game where the object is, well, to find a priceless vase inside a hotel. There's no huge storyline here, beyond that you are named Anthony Smith and are in need of money. You have a coin to start.

The puzzles to get through are, for the most part, trading. The trading doesn't make ultra-rigorous sense if you put your critic hat on (I still maintain that most people would rather eat a sandwich before playing sports than soup,) but if something is listed separate from the room description, it's important. There is even one dark room and one dark item. You can quickly figure they're related and you can use a light source–and that doesn't involve taking the lamps that are scenery.

You wind up having to guess two verbs along the way, which are not hard, though in one case, I tried to play it safe by adding a noun, e.g. EAT FROG instead of EAT, and the parser rejected it. Which was inconsistent with before when USE X didn't work, but USE X ON Y did. That said, the puzzles were fair.

ADL is a bit ancient, and as such, it doesn't naturally understand stuff like implicit nouns, like Inform dies. The confusion wasn't game-breaking, but this was frustrating in particular at the end, where I was in a slight "did I do this/try all possible combos of the command?" fog. In fact, at the end, I needed to spell something out, and I got pinged at first for not doing so, but then I remembered how to use the parser–because I'd seen it before. I don't know if ADL has this implicit-noun capability. We take it for granted.

This feels like a step up from the author's previous ADL efforts. The dark room provides some mystery, and the NPC interactions give the hotel some life, and the verb guess puzzles provide a good and very fair introduction to going beyond the basic commands. Stuff like double-dipping on important commands (e.g. taking something twice) is rejected, too. I guess my problem is that I was able to solve the puzzles because there was nothing else to do, and since the game had a solution, doing X had to be it. So I wasn't left as fulfilled as I could've been. And I wish more scenery could have been implemented.

This all feels fixable, though. The author mentioned he planned to tighten up certain things, and he ran into the deadline. And I've been there too.

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First Encounter, by T H Tyr
Good solid first game wih supernatural elements, June 19, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: TALP 2023

This looks like a first-time complete game from an author who had, as of 2023, some basic game elements and a partial one. So they knew what an initiate to text adventures might have had trouble with. Not only that, they've executed something that would work well on its own or as a fit for TALJ. First Encounter is a brief horror tale where a ghost of a woman appears to you, and you follow her. It's not quite clear why she appears, so there's some mystery.

However, you learn soon enough, because FE is relatively on rails. The experience was effective for me. There aren't many puzzles beyond finding a light source and leaving the house the right way. Locking yourself outside to follow ghosts with uncertain motives willy-nilly is just a bad idea and, in this case, taking precautions heightened the tension for me. There are also a few directed-verb-guessing puzzles. Here I'd suggest the tutorial might go on a bit longer. I really don't know if Adventuron has something to look at the input and say, for instance, if someone has a kazoo and people type BLOW KAZOO, "this is a relatively simple verb." But if it does, that feels like a tap-in for a post-comp release.

Saying the author didn't try to do too much always feels like a backhanded compliment because it kind of implies they shouldn't have considered reaching higher, or maybe they should not do so the next time. But here I hope it is sincere, because of the increasing scope I saw in their itch.io submissions, and it feels like they're ready to make another jump soon, if they want. Too many people, some with considerable skill and knowledge, shoot too high and wind up with nothing. I think TALP really helps with that--you'd better have an excuse to do too much! And one problem with a too-elaborate game is that it can exhaust reviewers and judges for the next one, though of course too many that lack details make us look for more exciting stuff elsewhere. And of course there's a balance between self-interest and not hogging the oxygen. It feels like EF made sure it did not hog the oxygen, and the author can and should be bolder with their next game.

FE works particularly well with TALP, as it took on a good subject and good atmosphere that forced it, or gave it an excuse, not to do too much. In this case, adults were sleeping and you didn't want to disturb them, which meant you couldn't go walking through the house. It may be the shortest one you play through in TALP, but that's more due to very sensible, logical cluing and an economy of use. There are few red herrings, if any.

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The Interactive Adventurer's Tutorial Adventure, by Cobwebbed Dragon
Made for TALJ, and made well., June 19, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: TALP 2023

Like Rex Mundane's PJTA, I was worried this might get too meta, or meta in the wrong way, and just like PJTA, I was glad to be proven wrong. The meta-fiction bits here have, to my knowledge, not been done before, but now I saw them, it feels like someone should have. And it also feels well-paced. What the author does could easily come off as forced. I think it might have the most effective tutorial segment I've seen in a TALP competition, as of 2023. The tutorial is integral to the first part of the game, and it flows well.

The object, for the first part, is simply to visit all the rooms, which is refreshing, as it takes a lot of the pressure off the player to do stuff right away. But of course it's not just a matter of mapping things out. The rooms are named after parser concepts. The first one is, appropriately, You Are Here, and other rooms include examining yourself, other objects, and locks. There's a side room. You have to navigate darkness to get to the real adventure. There's even an insta-death, which is pretty well clued and reversible. You don't quite get eaten by a grue.

I think the author deserves credit for (likely) resisting the temptation to hat-tip classic Infocom games. It would be fun for those of us experienced with parser play, but that sort of inside joke would ruin the welcoming atmosphere ParserComp seems to want to give. And also, it seems that the lack of really wild or catchy items or room names at the start is a design choice and one I agree with. While it might be interesting to see a more advanced tutorial discussing longer commands, or even one that goes through the history of Infocom games, that also might be outside of the scope of TALP. But IATA has opened the door.

The second part is a more classic adventure. Mystery builds and fits together at the end. There are keys and a safe and all sorts of things to examine. You can also type CLUE if you get stuck, which worked well for saying "don't bother with this location." The trickiest part for me was heeding the note that you can EXAMINE twice, but for the wrong item. In the end, there is a treasure to find, sort of.

It's impressive that the author took a bunch of standard adventuring items and put them into a game that feels like a really good introduction for people who might have trouble with parsers. I've played too many parser games to be sure of this, but certainly I had many "I wish I'd known that" moments when starting out. And while stuff like Zarf's reference card is certainly handy and well thought out, you can't really experience reference cards.

TALP is a great niche for this sort of thing, and while it would have been a good IFComp or Spring Thing entry, I can't imagine either of them inspiring it. Its focus and experimentation revolve around teaching. While IFCom and Spring Thing of course encourage experimentation, the experimentation there is more literary or with visual effects. And, of course, the specter of past not-so-robust homebrew parsers may make people think "oh no."

In TAIA's case, though, everything is pretty clearly spelled out. And it seems to anticipate mistakes the player may make. For instance, near the end, you have to guess a number, and one might be wrong, and it has a useful response to this. That doesn't make or break the game, but it was one of those "aha, the author really understands how not to frustrate the player" moments.

That's not to say TAIA neglects aesthetics. Colored text makes it easy to focus on what's important, and the text is consistently grouped nicely above the parser prompt, though I would needle the author for a change post-release. They talk about the EXAMINE command that can examine scenery – but it would be neat to have a different text style for scenery that could be examined, or an option to toggle it, much like the game had the HELP NUMBER option to toggle noting how many rooms you'd explored.

TAIA is done well. It teaches without being pedantic, and I like the ramping up into the main adventure, which was fun, too. You could even, if you want, say it doubles as a tutorial to make an adventure.

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Entre-d’œufs coquilles - An Eggcellent Preparation, by manonamora

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Has sunny side, not scrambled, June 19, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: TALP 2023

My first reaction on seeing this was, oh no, I wanted to play the parser hybrid the author wrote for spring thing, and I just got lazy/behind! But then there was oh yes. They, presumably, had the confidence to build on their experience and use a standard parser programming language. It's really interesting to see someone move from Twine back to parser languages, as so often it's been the other way. And in the case of AEP, it works well!

Having recently played a game that wasn't really about just making a PBJ sandwich, well, cooking eggs seemed in the same vein. Given the author's previous works I figured it wouldn't be a straightforward "just make breakfast" affair, and I was right. Don't be fooled by the fried eggs on the cover, though. That is not how the eggs are prepared. Perhaps showing how they should be would be a spoiler.

And this isn't about preparing a fancy egg feast, either! Though I wondered if it would be, where the author switched from Thick Table Tavern and different types of alcohol to, well, a cooking scenario with all different manner of eggs.

AEP is about something more interesting. It involves proposing to someone in an unexpected and memorable way, and no, it's not throwing eggs at them. I enjoyed the intrigue here. There was an explanation of what you needed to do and why, and how it worked scientifically, and it wasn't too long, but my adventure-game-theorist side immediately said "Oh, I can see what sort of puzzles would come from this."

The plot is, in a nutshell: get eggs from the hen house, then prepare them (not the hens, silly.) This makes part of your marriage proposal, if you do things right. The puzzles are well thought out and lend themselves well to tutorials that don't spoil things. There are ways to mess things up, and the tutorial mode notes a few of them both before and after the fact. I'm being vague about what to do with the eggs, because I hadn't read you could do that, and I think playing AEP would generate more interest and surprise than reading me post it here. (You find out pretty quickly, in-game.)

As for the story, there's some amusing awkwardness and tension over how and when to propose and, yes, there are ways to do it wrong. A traditional way fails badly, and for good reason if you pay attention to things in your house. It's also possible to propose incredibly unromantically. So that's all quite funny.

AEP was clearly successful, to me. I felt like sort of like a bum for pointing ticky-tacky stuff out, and I was sort of glad the browser swallowed my transcript on itch.io. Because, well, it's the sort of thing that pops up in an author's first parser game, especially if they were just coming off writing an ambitious entry for Spring Thing. While what you do is inventive, getting through is itself not too esoteric with good hinting. The in-game walkthrough is fine, especially coupled with the tidy text map. It's a good size for a first parser game, and it does a good job of funneling the player into what they should do when presenting them with an interesting task, one where I thought "does that really work? That's neat." In fact, it's interesting enough, it's something I might try in real life.

Many text adventures/interactive fictions may remind me of books I want to read or even coding I want to try for my own games. Or they make me Google images of some far-away cities or look up terms. But actually try something new? That's rare. AEP did that.

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Barry Basic and the Witch's Cave, by Dee Cooke

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Don't enter the cave, Barry! Um, until you're sure you need to, June 19, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: TALP 2023

After a few Barry Basic entries and several other works, one sort of expects a baseline for Dee Cooke's work, and Barry Basic and the Witch's Cave hits that and then some. It's an increasingly ironic name, because in each entry except the very first, you do something not very basic to Adventuron or text adventures at all. I'm worried even this allusion may be a spoiler, because when a lightbulb went on for me, it was a neat moment. It wasn't critical to solving things. Maybe I should have seen it right away. But this is intertwined with another BB game. It might make perfect sense if you played through things in order, though I'd be interested to trade experiences with people who played Barry Basic in a different order than I did. It would probably impact us both differently.

If I recall correctly, BB was one of the games allowed in slightly post-deadline. Good choice by the organizers! And the worst I can say about it is – the difficulty jumps from on the easy side to what is a very neat sequence to complete the final task, so that's uneven. But the final puzzle is quite fun.

In BBWC, you've been sent to the seaside, chaperoned by a horrible teacher named Mr. Brawl, who will spend the day reading the sports section and yelling at kids not to go in the cave. Your task: pick up five seashells, and since Barry is physically slower and weaker than most others, and he's already been pushed around on the bus ride up, there's not much left when he gets going. At first, Barry has to use (ahem) basic verbs to discover a few shells. But of course that cave is there for a reason! After all, this game wasn't titled "Barry Basic and the Witch's Cave He Avoided." And I enjoyed how it jibed with Barry's adventures in future games, looking where he was not supposed to.

The adventure turns surreal once in the cave, with an underground lake and such and new verbs to learn. They're nonstandard, but you know them. How? Well, I'm torn between waffling on this review and giving out untagged spoilers. Suffice it to say the final shell is definitely the hardest, and Barry has an interesting run-in with another student, described below.

(Spoiler - click to show)That student is Tony O'Hara, whom I didn't realize was Barry's big strong friend in Quick Escape until near the end. Then I felt dumb I didn't notice it! I like how the author plays off how Tony and Barry see things, without playing the DUH TONY IS DUMB card. And after I realized Tony was that Tony, I realized it answered another question I had in BBQE: how the heck did these two very different people wind up as friends? Perhaps we will find how Barry and Gill met in another game in the series, too. I'd like that.

Also, I'd like to see more Adventuron games where you can switch between characters. On the strength of the Barry Basic games, I see a lot of possibilities.


That run-in, though, made me realize the one thing I felt was missing. It's well done, as you do things to the landscape that make the graphics for a room change (the author does a lot of this. It's a neat feature of Adventuron.) But it has something its predecessors don't. Barry already feels established in them, and here, if the difficulty isn't as well distributed (yet--post comp releases can fix stuff) Barry Basic and the Speed Daemon felt more smoothly paced despite being bigger. It felt like the author missed a chance to maybe put in more conflicts with other kids, nothing terribly violent, but enough to make puzzles tougher before ramping up to the big one. Still, the game is more than complete, and I wouldn't have liked the author to put off publishing BBWC over that.

So, yes, I really liked BBWC overall. Mr. Brawl is an effective antagonist, though there is another, later. You just know that cave he tells you not to explore is going to be explored, and you will find out why it is dangerous. The conflicts were resolved well. I am already looking forward to a fifth entry. If you are considering playing this after TALP 2023, though, I recommend you start with Barry Basic and the Quick Escape.

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Mr Seguin's Goat, by auraes
Possibly too challenging for TALP but a good story, June 18, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: TALP 2023

Mr Seguin's Goat (MSG) seems a bit miscast for TALP, but it does seem to be a worthy effort, if more than a bit opaque. It's an adaptation of Daudet's short story, which you can find on gutenberg.org about a goat who wants freedom, and she has warned that it will be the death of her, but she goes anyway. She meets a male goat, and then she meets her fate in the form of a wolf who kills her. Cheery stuff!

MSG is largely faithful to the story, with of course the obligatory ways for the player to mess up and a few tricky roadblocks and frustrations to endure. It's cruel on the Zarfian scale, largely due to a deck of cards you must find. Here the game seems to tease you by making card 2 easy to find, and later you find cards 3 and 4. The problem? It's divided into four chapters, and you can't go back. You may suspect there is a card 1, but it's not obvious.

Perhaps there is something like the learned helplessness experiment with the rats and the shocks here. If it's intentional, it's a sly trick to pull on TALP. The start is relatively charming. You are a goat on a farm, and you need to eat three things before your owner milks you. You are tethered to a post, so you can only go two rooms away. The coding here must be rather clever, as you could go north/west/south/east from the start, but not with the post. It also underscores the security you feel, which is a trade-off for the freedom you think you really want. Something important to the best ending, so to speak, is outside of your initial range.

One character in the first part tips you off to the existence of the other, who is kind of tough to find due to the verbs. The game has a list of verbs, and while you can brute-force your way through them, it gets tiring. I wound up finding the card and not guessing the verb because (Spoiler - click to show)it was bloody, and I figured the blood had dried. The descriptions aren't especially lush, since the game is in Quill format and fits into a Z3 file.

Indeed, I felt I was missing something, but a bit of impatience kicked in. And while Mr. Seguin asked "are you sure you've done everything here?" I was in the mood to push forward. Especially since there was a fence where you need to JUMP FENCE instead of JUMP, even after you've jumped and it could be implicit.

This all seems a bit more like "here's how a parser can be a bit sly and so you have to use your head if things don't work" than a genuine tutorial. The author probably had to save space for the Z3 game. But it felt almost like an anti-tutorial, and a list of possible verbs really didn't change stuff.

So that's the bad stuff, and I think it's important to be warned about that before going on to what works rather better, which is the assortment of animals that you as Blanchette, the goat, talk to. Some don't react much, some just chat, and some show the same fatalistic fear that the reader may be feeling. Some warn you against doing further, and some are willing to help you on your way to the top of the mountain to meet the wolf. You're pretty sure you can win!

The story reads like a conglomeration of fables, but it works, overall, to me, once you see what to do with the puzzles. You find a secret passage. You realize an upturned cart needs to be moved. You find a use for dung.

The game foreshadows a bad end throughout, as when your owner locks you in the barn to stop you from fleeing, but then you get out anyway. A few of the puzzles involve killing a weaker animal than yourself, or leading them to their doom. Some seem resigned to it. It's not especially cheery in retrospect. There's a bit of odd causality with some dancing faeries that disappear once you solve a puzzle elsewhere. A sign somehow counts as wood and bread. The climax at the end is a fight with the wolf. I can't spoil it too much, but it is a sort of card game, and it relies on you picking up the cards that you found.

I wound up getting only 60 out of 100 points, and a lot of people were baffled as to whether there were 40 others, or maybe this was just another trick the author played on us to say, well, you can't even get close to what you want.

As mentioned above, Mr. Seguin's Goat felt like it would have fit in better with ParserComp or a TinyInform jam. It doesn't really have a tutorial behind a list of verbs that you can crank through and eventually get the right one, and there's even a sign that you READ to see that you are veru obedient! I'll take it as snark pointed at the goat and not the player. That, and how I figured the one missing card was destroyed when I found it, and taking a while to figure how to put something in the cart, slowed things down a lot for me. Perhaps I should have tried some of the solutions, in the general "there must be a solution here" vein. It would have worked. But I think it would run contrary to the spirit of TALP, which is about intuiting the right answer or at least telling the player what to do.

Still, I'm glad to see a retelling of an unusual story. There is macabre imagination here, and it's an accomplishment to figure what you did and look back through the journey. It's fatalistic without a "ha ha you had no chance." But boy, it's the feistiest TALP game I've played by a long shot.

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DO NOT KILL THE SLEEPING BEAST, by mogar

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A strong and flexible allegory, June 18, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

ALL CAPS titles can reel me in or repel me quickly. This did the first. It suggests not just nonviolence but enforced nonviolence. After all, the sleeping beast hasn’t killed you yet! Um, at all. Who are you to strike the first blow? You're in no shape right now! And if you need to kill it, maybe you are being melodramatic about your problem? Maybe you have to admit you have a problem? Maybe you're ignoring the people with the real problems, or maybe you think you're too good to have real problems!

Yes, this is about addiction, or it can be, which you might infer from the cover art with beer bottles. Works about addiction always take a lot out of me, considering whether or not it works. So be warned. They can put me into a pensive rage about things I was told were good for me but in fact put me at serious risk of substance addiction. And I think I’ve discussed before how, say, playing games I don’t enjoy any more (or games just to say I completed reviewing everything for a comp/jam) is sometimes an anodyne that hides my fear of pushing ahead with something I've meant to do for a while. "Well, it’s not lethal," you hear. But there are less horrible sleeping beasts on the surface that can keep their hooks in you longer. That I thought about having to write reviews for every single entry, and writing a review for DNKTSB anyway--one that might even eclipse the 500 word jam limit!--tells you what I thought about this entry.

I think Twine works like this have definitely matured over the years. They’re a lot less in-your-face and feel a lot less like they have to prove a point or be exciting or exemplify the pinnacle of a certain art form. (Maybe I’ve mellowed on my views towards them, too, because there is less of a choice vs parser war than before.) But the fact is--this is surreal without being crazy, and it left me thinking yes, this is an addictive pattern I had, and this is something I couldn't break away from. Addiction is the easy one, but I also remember people who genuinely wanted to help me but I felt I couldn't pull away from some others. As if I didn't want to ruin the happy people's time. These people trying to help are the King in the story, who can be interpreted several different ways. His willingness to help and good intents and even his contempt for your situation are up for interpretation, as is the beast. Having a King and beast also, for me, left me with the question "doesn't someone else deserve to slay a beast first?" It's a nonsense question--you do what you can, and you can never be sure you've slain the beast. But it's one we've all had, if we're reflective.

As for the mechanics, there are a few questions with the same response. So this doesn’t especially branch, but I think (and this may be an old choice trope by now) it doesn’t matter, and you’re stuck. Here you ask how likable you are but are pretty convinced you’re not being objective, and if anyone really cared, or you were worth caring about, they’d help you out. It’s a heckuva dilemma to be in. Certainly I got to imagining "well, I-the-character am less likable for having an addiction, and I probably can’t get back to where I was, which wasn’t great anyway, or I would bring down the average happiness in the room there but not here."

The level of fantasy with the king, the knight (you) and the beast was not too in-my-face and gave me leeway to think of a lot of things. And it captured well how addiction/depression etc. is like a cycle where you say you don’t have the energy to tackle THAT yet, or it isn’t quite SO bad, or it could be worse. Then you have stretches where things go right and you wonder if they really are that right, or you feel dumb not breaking out in the first place.

It reminded me, too, of other things, such as comments by my family about how (paraphrased) druggies hang together. So don’t hang with the wrong crowd or you will get into drugs! And the isolation this presents turns that bit of nasty prejudice on its head because, as research has found, isolation increases the risk of drug use. No, it's not necessarily loud parties, etc. And this character is certainly alone in the game context.

While I prefer comedic works, or ones with a strong vein of comedy, I didn't want to pass up that DNKTSB was effective for me. It asked for a lot, but it helped address a few unfunny things that were tricky for me. I tend not to like kitchen-sink works about trauma. Perhaps I, like the hero in the story, just can't quite kill the beast today, so I settle for less. But on the other hand, a lot of side beasts can get killed with works like DNKTSB.

For what it's worth, after playing DNKTSB, which takes place at night when you're alone, I stayed up late, thinking about things that were broken and things I wanted to fix. It felt constructive. I made a small commitment to avoid some old beasts I didn't have to kill, I hope. So it was practical for me, too.

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Big Barbarian's Tiny Adventure, by nlem

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Short words and sentence: laughy Jam entry. Grah!, June 17, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Neo Twiny Jam

BBTA is right up my alley. It’s not the first spoof of adventure gaming, and it’s not the first twine game with directions out there (this could be inspired by the parser or by side-scrolling RPGs,) but I enjoyed it a lot, because I think having the word limit forced the author into stylistic choices to avoid elaborate jokes that maybe were heard before, or conventions which wouldn't add anything to the story.

Mages would have to worry about big long spell names. Priests? Praying and so forth. Thieves might be too obsessed with treasure. Bards? Well, you have to shoehorn in a song or two, to make them believable characters.

Barbarians are entities of few words, and they certainly don't futz about with spells! They are people of action. The result is a dungeon that is as big as it could be withe the word limit. I counted eight rooms when I mapped BBTA on a Post-it note.

BBTA also has a few deaths that you really should know if you paid attention. One is hinted particularly well. It is worth taking the scenic route for them. And as brevity is the soul of wit, they and the puzzles do indeed combine for a good deal of humor.

At the end, you get a choice of reward, and the unusual but in-character one is quite funny. About the only disappointment (for me) for this entry was that there wasn’t more in-game art like the image! That said, it was easy enough to imagine.

BBTA felt like more than comic relief as opposed to the more serious entries. There's craft and thought in there, like a Cheech and Chong skit featuring hapless idiots you can't help but like. (Hey, I like Cheech and Chong!) The decisions are surprisingly impactful. And it's fun to replay and see if the choices you make at the start matter for getting through the game. (Spoiler - click to show)They seem to make a difference with how much you get injured, but since you're a barbarian, you brush it off.

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Text Adventure Collector, by Rex Mundane

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Not the first Scott Adams tribute, but a good one, June 6, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Text Adventure Collector (TAC) is about, well, collecting old text adventures. It's written in the Scott Adams style, replete with short sentences in the room descriptions and action response. And while I suppose Jason and the Argonauts is the gold standard for this kind of thing, there's always room for a new angle. Perhaps there's a ceiling to this-all, because the self-referential humor and winking nostalgia at the good old days, where the author acknowledges the bad bits, only goes so far. But that ceiling is well above my-lousy-apartment games if the author is capable. And Rex Mundane is.

All you have to do is find ten text adventures (they appear in your inventory in helpful rainbow font! I love that Adventuron has this as a feature) and put them back in your bookshelf. They're all parodies of ones known and loved by the author, and though I drew a blank on a few, I noticed Garry Francis drew a blank on a few others and said so in the game's Itch.io thread. The author provided what translated to what. Zurk is one of the more obvious ones, and The Galactic Stowaway's Manual ... well, think about it a bit, and you'll get it.

And my favorite joke -- as part of a puzzle, you have to pry an iron key away from a magnetic scroll. There's more than enough subversion in the game to keep the puzzles fresh. They're pretty crazy but nothing mind reading, though you have to do a good bit of exploring to see how anything fits together. You'll be stuck with a colorless orb, but a wizard wants a dark orb, and so you have to find what item goes with it. The Wompus (no, not the Wumpus!) is described in another room, and so you learn how to defeat it. And there's a teleport spell to learn, which is not XYZZY, but there's some funny meta-humor about people not wanting you to use it. The clipped prose works well, too, with the toner being laconically described as "Overpriced." So while the game clocks in at 26 rooms, which is a bit contrary to the minimalist spirit of the competition, the prose makes up for it. I think one problem with retro/meta-humor games is that they get too involved in a joke, and maybe the contest's general guidelines helped the author keep the game text tidy, so the jokes flowed.

As for the games you find -- well, it's possible you may guess a few of them with what you need. The big problem may be it's frustrating to have to do and search for a lot before getting that first item. A screwdriver ... well, you probably know what that refers to. But you don't need any knowledge.

The author shows a lot of talent in TAC, and it's a fun time. But it's a bit limited by what's already there. And this is a tricky one--between TAC and the author's other game, there's a lot of fun meta-humor. And it isn't just about retro games and a love for them, which the author clearly shares, but it reminded me of After-Words from IFComp 2021. (Okay, this game was published in 2020. But, not being aware of Adventuron's existence until May 2021, I played After-Words first.)

I could read this sort of thing for a while, and if the author has more such ideas, they should take them. Because while this hits the mark for those of us who grew up with text adventures, those younger among us may only look at the jokes and suspect they seem pretty good. They are. And I think my relative lack of "oh that joke/trope again" reactions speaks to that the author didn't just try to check all the boxes with TAC.

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Insomnia: Twenty-Six Adventures After Dark, by Leon Lin

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Funny and technically/narratively worthy, May 15, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Spring Thing 2023

As a fellow Spring Thing 2023 author, I was amused to note a similarity between Insomnia and Write or Reflect–well, WoR in helpful mode, anyway! Both have a possibility of going to endings you’ve seen before. (Insomnia has a bit more writing as a payoff, and said writing is better organized through some pretty diverse adventures!)

But they have different mechanisms for helping you to find all the different endings, so to speak.

Also, I’d like to thank the author for an early encouraging note to me about WoR. I hope this is good payback. So any suggestions here are “It’d be neat to do this too!”

WoR’s helpful mode lets you know if you’re about to walk into a node where all endings are covered. So you will get there, and rather quickly, by trial and error. It forces you to find the right path, which may ruin the fun of exploration.

But Insomnia leaves a bit of a puzzle. It’s quite up-front about things and I think even the endings seem to be organized so that, say, ending #1 is “first choice all the way through” and #26 is “last choice all the way through.” So you have a neat idea of what you can target and when and how. There’s some neat intuition here that I like, because while I enjoy branching Twine games, I sort of cringe at having to look at the source to knock off that last ending or two. Whether or not the endings diverge as much as Insomnia!

So I’m not aware of anything else that handles the endings as Insomnia does. But I’d be interested to see others, because I think it’s a great idea well-executed that helps it go beyond "yet another zany Twine game with clever fun writing." Especially since Insomnia doesn't try to slide on its zaniness alone. There's a funny ethical dilemma (well, not really) and I was amused to find the main villain was someone named Richards. With apologies to people whose last name is Richards, I laughed, remembering a line from a story I never wrote in college: "Geez, you have Richards this year for English? What an asshole!" Richards is, indeed, worse than that. I thank Insomnia for dredging up my irrational subconscious hate of people surnamed Richards. Especially if they have mustaches and wear corduroy blazers with elbow patches. (That's part of my never-published story.)

Insomnia's structure and bumpers open up possibilities for creating Twine-ish paths elsewhere, maybe even allowing the player a difficulty knob of how much they want to spoil.

For instance, you could have a counter saying, once you’ve hit all the endings in the (Spoiler - click to show)UFO branch (there are four) two times, that one is blocked off somehow or the node is bumped back! It seems like this would be tricky to do in Twine, but it would allow for a VERY branching game with even more than 26 endings so that the player’s energy would focus less on staying patient and juggling endings and more on the writing.

(Another neat idea, especially if the game had meta components, would be to allow the player maybe 2-3 glimpses at a branching ending map. Or maybe even label the endings 11111, etc., based on which choice gets you somewhere in the minimum tries.)

Insomnia is definitely a fun light-hearted read but it brings up some (to me) engaging, serious issues of how to keep the player’s attention and the niceties we should add to help them along and feel the optimal amount of stuck so we had a neat challenge, without giving up!

All these considerations, though, are nothing to lose sleep over. Ha ha ha.

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Talk to him about love, by auraes

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
I'm a bit baffled, but I can't hate it, January 31, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron 2019 CaveJam

TTHAL has a noble, unusual goal for a Cave Jam setting: awaken a stone troll and bring him back to life! This is where the "love" comes in. There's not a lot of talking, though. However, there is lots of fourth-wall humor, including a memo that keeps flying away when you examine it. Finding it several times helps you progress through the story. There's also a key you have to lose and find again, as well as baby birds you have to kill, but not really.

It's all a bit of a trip to me. The main thing to remember going through the game is that if something disappears, it's probably in a location where nothing has happened yet. Bonus points are dispensed oddly, for finding walls that aren't described and some guess-the-verb that makes moderate sense in retrospect, once you realize what the author was going for.

Still, this game broke me pretty quickly. I had trouble following the story, simple though it was, and there seemed to be a moral message (you become king of the ravens for a bit but worry you are evil). And i learned to expect that even taking an item in front of you is fraught with silly risks. Indeed, just being able to take something and have it, or me, stay as-is was a great surprise.

Later versions seem to have curbed some excesses, such as the deep mine that used to be 1000 levels (you jumped from 20 to 30, then 100 to 200, but still, it's nice they cut it down). This one needs a walkthrough to appreciate the jolly graphics. It seems very good-hearted. But some of the jumps are a bridge too far for me without more in-depth explanation.

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Snowhaven, by Tristin Grizel Dean

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Making a meal of reflection, in a good way, January 31, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: ParserComp 2021

Snowhaven takes place in, well, winter. The object is to make a stew for your brother, who is dropping by. It has three modes, and the third is mature and thus password-protected. I played through Pleasant and Emotive, which have the same map but also have slightly different puzzles and scenery. Both were effective and a bit unnerving, and the accomplishments list at the end of the game suggested Sinister mode was very sinister indeed. I think it's what scared me off playing back in ParserComp. I'm sad I missed it now, though, and I'd like to try it some time, though.

The graphics are very attractive, black-and-white ASCII-ish stuff with some animation indicating winds and, thus, extra wind chill. They help give starkness without anything being too imposing. And, indeed, your small home and the forest surrounding it are pretty bleak. Trees and such and even a river are dark.

The one difference between Pleasant and Emotive that I won't spoil is that you need a different meat for the stew. Finding and preparing said meat is trickier and, frankly, more bloody. Again referring to Sinister mode, I'm left a bit fearful of what happens there. So the password may've been effective in unexpected ways by leaving certain bits hidden.

There is a good deal of verb-munging to make the soup (finding several items needs a small leap of logic, but one that makes sense once you figure it,) and I also had some trouble making a snare in the second part, but I think this is part of the slice-of-life experience the author intended. Nevertheless between that and the text pauses, things felt like a bit of a chore. I knew what I needed to do, and perhaps Adventuron's focus on two-word commands may've inhibited the author helping the player as much as they'd have liked. Sometimes this is very on-point--for instance, the game taps you not to leave a food locker open with wild animals around. But other times, the repetition is slightly tiresome, e.g. chopping up the vegetables and placing them in the pot yet again. There is also a bit of odd forcing causality beyond just the game nudging you to avoid a certain area for now, or to go back and dump what you have in the soup--the reason for "Emotive" requires you to do something that fits in the story, but it shouldn't logically help you find the meat you need for your stew.

So there's some mimesis-breaking and a good chunk of repetition of similar actions between the two settings, but these criticisms seem less important than noting the author has managed to create two similar, parallel stories that are effective in different ways. (Probably three. I hope to verify this one day.) So it's a very impressive work, and certainly, once it's on the back burner, it's easier to remember the inventive bits than the parser-wrangling that, at least in part, gave a proper "it's tough in winter" feel. I think people may find Snowhaven tough to get into because it's not as directly cheery as the author's other games, and a few jumps you have to make early on may seem tricky, but that shouldn't stop people from enjoying it.

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Hallowe'en: Night of the Misty Manor, by Dee Cooke

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Overwhelming, but funny, game about Halloween curses and camaraderie, January 31, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron 2019 Halloween Jam

HNMM starts out as a fetch quest but soon swerves into greater scary-farce. You visit an old folks' home and, finally, the misty manor in the title. Along the way there's a branch based on which mask you choose.

It's good fun if you know what to do, but I can't escape mentioning its biggest weakness, so you're prepared if you've enjoyed the author's other works (as I have) and want to see all of HNMM. This all spilled over, but I hope it's more to provide a buffer than to read a loud laundry list the author, who's a veteran at writing games by now but maybe wasn't then, probably knows and sees.

You can get stuck in several unwinnable states, and there is some arbitrary stuff you need early on. That's a problem of zany games in general that try to provide a lot of replay value. For instance, there's a sugar packet necessary for one of the five branches, but if you make it through another, there's no clue which branch you need the packet in. There was enough of this that I needed a couple more sessions to work through each alternate path (there are five total, including a no-mask option,) and I did use a walkthrough.

Once you get to a place, you may say "Oh! I wish I had (X) now!") but because the game map is broken into a few distinct parts, you won't be able to go back. So it's tough to see ahead. And it's also tough to figure when you're at or near the final puzzle, and it's easy to worry you may be shut out from a win in other ways. Given that HNMM keeps throwing zany situations at you, it seems like there can always be several more, and the game's score is tracked internally.

So--yes, just save before you choose a mask, and save before you enter the mansion. You'll be able to enjoy HNMM best that way. And there is a lot to enjoy despite the technical unfriendliness of being locked out near the final puzzle.

You are Eilidh, charged with supervising four kids younger than you as you go to an old folks' home to entertain them, but first, you have to find a gift. Nearly everyone at the party refers you to the next person, who says "oh, wait, no, the gift is over THERE instead." Which certainly gives you the feeling of "oh, man, i sort of don't want to deal with these kids." But I didn't want to actually throw anything. The scenes where you'd probably get exasperated in real life are funny in writing, though there is one guess-the-verb situation that's so on the nose I didn't consider it ((Spoiler - click to show)you're told you need to distract someone, and the verb is DISTRACT X</spoiler).) The scene at the old folks' home is sort of sad, and the kids' performances are objectively terrible in a funny way. Then you're given a spooky green rock as a gift.

This is where the manor comes into play. I figured a way in, but it was a one-way affair. Puzzles included sneaking up the stairs silently and giving a creepy girl a gift. There are neat touches such as having to peel an apple and the peel turning into a random letter, which is the first letter of your husband's name. Then there is the random bit based on what mask you wear. It's rather funny if you don't wear one, period.

The author had a lot of wacky humor to dump in, and it didn't all hit for me, but the aggregate on the whole was successful. While you do have to retrace a lot of steps even with strategic restore, HNMM hits all the undead ghoulies and tropes it's always fun to tweak for a laugh. By the first end I had some fear of "oh no am I trapped this time" but they had some really clever ways to let you retreat back to your car, or at least near it, as you explored more weird and spooky places. And so I felt like I could feel may way through well enough with the final mask--though I did have to make sure I had the special item(s) I needed!

HNMM is ambitious, but isn't as focused as the author's latest efforts, and it makes a few unfair demands on the player. However, it was neat to see Eilidh and Deirdre from its sequel Day of the Sleigh again. It felt like the sort of odds-and-ends game we all have in us, and whenever we get it out, we will, and it's more than worth doing. While parts definitely feel a bit arbitrary, it is a good dose of humor that all Halloween jams can use to offset the more serious entries.

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Seeker of Magic, by Garry Francis

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A solid, no-frills, linear magic treasure cave jaunt, January 29, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

It's weird, stumbling on Adventuron late and still having a backlog of stuff I really want to see. I've seen writers' more mature works first, with the earlier ones coming later. All sorts of factors, then, blunt ambition. The new authoring system is tricky to learn, there aren't resources, parts of the syntax may not be ironed out, and maybe there aren't as many great shortcuts or examples yet. People just want to get a nice game out there. And in the case of SoM, Garry Francis did. And went on to even nicer.

Overall I think the only possible point against SoM is that it is relatively unambitious, as a cave exploration game. As a thief armed only with a knife, you get by a gross troll (a highlight of the graphics, both when it is in your way or defeated for good,) make fire, solve a riddle, and pick off a slightly unexpected treasure. Hence the twenty points in the game, with only four actions. The map is linear. You get in and out. There's a quite sensible inventory-capacity (well, sort of) puzzle.

It's all over a bit too soon. I wondered if I'd really earned the treasure I found, but maybe part of this was due to the nature of the treasure and my enjoying the ride.

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The Witch's Apprentice, by Garry Francis

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Peak Adventuron, January 29, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron 2019 Halloween Jam

I played Santa's Trainee Elf recently before playing WA, so my cynical first reaction was "Wait! Garry's already done this before, but for a different holiday." But of course WA was released in 2019, STE in 2020. And, well, it's a very good thing they're similar. Both have neat graphics and are really sensible and entertaining fetch quests that fit the season. If you forced me to decide, I'd say STE is a bit richer and handles the whole "find stuff to make something special for kids" a bit better. But I liked them both a lot.

In WA, you are an apprentice who must find eight ingredients for the witch, for a potion to keep kids safe this Halloween. Some require more creativity than others. One even requires you to remove a cat's bell collar so they can (Spoiler - click to show)catch a rat. It's well-timed and paced, too, with the run-up to entering the Witch's mansion being just a bit spooky. There's no response when you knock, and the author deserves full credit for the joke/minor puzzle therein.

The mansion has a lot of off-limit areas that help it feel big without the game being overwhelming, and pretty much every sort of spooky location is covered. It's a three-story affair with a backyard, too. The ingredients aren't anything too novel. They don't need to be, though I laughed at needing rotten fruit. But there are amusing explanations for alternate names for mustard seed and buttercups. WA has a lot of small subversions of general witch tropes, and I particularly enjoyed poking at the scenery you couldn't use yet, or didn't know how to, as if to reinforce that you're an apprentice without belaboring the point.

WA just feels like the sort of game Adventuron was made for. You couldn't quite write it in Inform, and the parser bits feel like they'd lose something in Twine. I enjoy Garry's Inform games, but his writing seems to have a bit more character in Adventuron. There seems to be some nice synergy with the graphics.

Which leaves just one question. When's that Adventuron Valentine's Day jam coming? I'd love to see a trilogy from the author, if they had the inspiration.

(edited 1/29/23 5 PM, originally posted 1/28/23 5 PM)

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The Cave of Hoarding, by Dee Cooke

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
The reverse of a treasure hunt, January 29, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

It's always amusing what authors can come up with when given a theme for a jam. I mean, some of us (like me) will probably play it safe and not take any big risks or even try to shoehorn their own specific knowledge into their effort. But others are better at saying, okay, how can we subvert this meaningfully, in ways the next entrant probably won't, either?

This is what happens in CoH. You'd think, with a title like that, it'd be a romp through a cave with a lot of treasure. But really it's about hiding treasure for later, as in, finding a place it can sit so people won't see it and eventually forget it's missing.

Such is your task from one Mr. Lo Kingdom. You and your not-really-friend Msndy (you're more like a chauffeur) need to find a way to hide things. Mandy's a bit absent-minded and can even get killed, which detracts from your point total even though Lo Kingdom mentions she was a liability if you fail to protect her. She manages to kind of mess things up along the way.

There aren't very many puzzles here. It's pretty obvious who is guarding the item you need and what you need to do with them. So burying the treasure is not too bad. It's turning things back to as they were beforehand that's the tricky bit. This is nowhere near as complicated and intriguing as Sub Rosa, but it's still a bit of fun. There's even a bit where Lo Kingdom gives you money for something special you have, because he's "persuasive" like that, but it's something you wanted to keep. This costs one point at the end. The points aren't displayed in-game, and given the author's later works, I like that she made the switch from points to achievements.

CoH does feel a bit less substantial than the author's later efforts, and I don't think this is general "oh people always get better" revisionism. For instance, Day of the Sleigh may have fewer rooms, but it feels like there's more to do, and the jokes are more focused, and the alternate paths and odd achievements feel more logical. Nevertheless I was glad to see there was a game of Dee Cooke's I'd overlooked, and I enjoyed working through the branches. Maybe it's a bit on the silly side, but given that the game's general intent is to do things backwards, it should have leeway for that.

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Century, by Zuuri

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Avoid the bugs, and it's a quick affair. Neat graphics., January 29, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron 2019 CaveJam

So, okay, I went to Garry Francis's walkthrough up at CASA/Solutionarchive.com pretty quickly for this one. Which is sad. The graphics are cheery and colorful. But it hits the "you have amnesia and are not sure what you're doing" a bit too heavily--and unintentionally, in the case of some verb-guessing.

Being stuck in the cave isn't so bad. This part is decently well-contained, though why and how the combination to a safe is scattered in parts about the area is a mystery. The puzzles are sensible. You find a key in the safe. You get out and climb a tree and even hunt for food! (This part is random and frustrating and chases people off. The next puzzles seem like arbitrary guesswork, unless i am missing something.)

You then find some treasure, except ... except ...

Well, the ending had me shaking my head a bit, too. I felt heckled. Not that that's a bad thing, and not that it was particularly abusive, but the shift from "what's going on here, anyway?" felt as helter-skelter as the game itself.

Given the chaos that transpired even with a walkthrough, I recommend you have one close by if you take the plunge with this game. There's a certain eagerness to it, to give you some standard adventure-game locations with weird twists, along with some puzzles that should feel good to solve. But they bounce from perhaps too obvious to "whoah, that was weird" too quickly.

However, if you're one of those people who can get into playing every game in a comp once you start, take solace in this game having enough heart that any frustration endured because of these puzzles is not lasting. That's how Adventuron rolls.

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A Mission in Time, by Soso

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Explore forest, avoid beast, find relics, January 29, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron 2019 CaveJam

"Astronauturon" feels like the sort of word a native thinker couldn't figure out, or that we might dismiss as too odd. But it works, a portmanteau of astronaut and Adventuron, presumably. It's far less plain than "A Mission in Time." Though the execution itself isn't especially snazzy, for better or worse: you're in a dark forest with a lot of rooms, but it's not really overwhelming. You're an astronaut coming back down to Earth, which humanity fled when it was irratiated, but after a hundred years, it's relatively safe again.

Well, except for that bear chasing you around the map. I didn't get caught by it, but some red text indicated it was nearby, as I took photos of artifacts with my camera. Then I went back to the ship and uploaded them, which presented the main game puzzle: there's a time capsule hidden outside the initial rooms you can view, and since your inventory capacity is two (three, if you drop the camera,) and there are six items on the photograph which you now recognize, you need to decide what is most practical.

This part is not very taxing, but recovering the time capsule is effective, and of course, when you win, you see what's in it. The ending is a bit cute, maybe too cute for the general mood, but it wrapped things up nicely.

Astronauturon is not a crushing experience, nor an unfriendly one, and the mapping goes quickly. But it feels like there could've been more puzzles with the items you find in the house, and the camera mechanic could have been used more. I feel like I may have missed something during my quick playthrough. I quickly went from being worried the map would be too tangled to wishing there was a bit more to do. But it works, and the black and white graphics are a neat touch that help emphasize the red text without overdoing it.

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The Missing Witch, by Dawn Mary Mac

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Short semi-spooky game with a funny instadeath, January 28, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron 2019 Halloween Jam

I'm really impressed by how unironically good last-place games can be in Adventuron jams, and The Missing Witch is no exception. Perhaps it doesn't soar, but it clearly does more than just make up the numbers, and if you're playing through the whole jam, you won't want to miss it.

You play as a nine-year-old who wants to get into a party and have some adventures. These involve, well, a lost witch. So the beginning is largely reconnaissance. One thing you must find is in your home, and if you dawdle too long, your parents make you stay in. (There's a joke to this. I won't spoil it.) The other things you need are strewn about the scenery, and this might be a pain in Inform with the non-sparse room descriptions, but Adventuron's ability to highlight critical words makes everything easier.

Once you've got a costume for the party, the summoning really starts. I was thrown a bit because I had to remove my costume to reach one semi-hidden room, and I was worried the twins would come after me, but that was relatively trivial. Getting there involves standard item-munging. There's a crypt of sorts to explore at the end, too.

The sorcery involved is decidedly g-rated and, well, it's trivial guess-the-verb. The ending was satisfying. It's a nice balance of kids'-party and minor spoernatural creepiness. So I really recommend playing through. Even if you get stuck, there's only so much to do, and there's one NPC you may forget about that turns out, indeed, to be an obstacle later.

One tip, though: the author added AI art for the 2.0 version now on itch.io, but it's in a 1x1 ratio, meaning you can't see it unless you narrow your browser a good deal. This, however, is worth it, since the graphics do add to the experience.

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The Mansion, by Manuel Sagra

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Short game about skeleton is comfortable in own skin, January 28, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron 2019 Halloween Jam

The Mansion definitely recognizes it's close to cliche. It recognizes it probably isn't going to shake you out of your chair. But it's short and tidy for all that and about as light-hearted as a game about an amnesiac skeleton could be, and it's well-focused. You will immediately see what to do at the end, but that's because the author didn't try to do anything crazy.

You wake up unaware of who you are or were in a locked room, and you slowly make your way around spooky grounds. There's a diary filling in the past, along with a shovel for digging, a spooky portrait, and an empty suit of armor. Perhaps you've seen these before in other games. There are a few small jokes if you examine everything, which isn't arduous.

Given there are maybe six rooms, it's not hard to find the way through, and you may guess what one special-seeming item is for. (I never did figure what the hammer and nails were for!) The game's main challenge is navigating the inventory capacity of two, I assume because you have two hands and aren't very strong.

Every comp seems to have that one game that's very competent and says, hey, here's a bit of fun, take it or leave it. I'm not going to be profound, but I am well-constructed, and you're not going to get lost. The Mansion, down to its generic name, is that, and yet it was spooky enough, even as I was pretty sure of what I was supposed to be doing, and the end had just enough of a twist to make me look back in worry.

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The Life (and Deaths) of Doctor M, by Michael D. Hilborn

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Love or hate your protagonist, there's a lot in here, January 27, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

LDDM was, strictly speaking, too long for IFComp. But I'm glad it was in there. It was immensely demanding and rewarding, and it gave me much more to think about than the average work that assures you it is Making You Think. It managed to both place high and win the Golden Banana. Sixth is the highest place for an IFComp Banana winner, though A Paradox Between World achieved a higher percentile in 2021, being #10 of 71, versus #6 of 39.

LDDM deals with the concept of assisted suicide. You, Doctor M, are a purveyor of it, to the famous and anonymous, to the rich and poor. But the question is: are you a good person or a bad one? Throughout LDDM, you see evidence for and against it. There are awful people you please and annoy and good people you please and annoy. People argue it's done for fame, and others argue it was not. Some of your patients seemed to give full consent, and some didn't, and in some cases it may not have been so humane. Then there is the mystery of your death. I felt like LDDM did a good job of keeping things neutral while still being exciting to play through. It reminded me of the one chapter in Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot where the narrator alternately blocked out events from Flaubert's life so as to make a work like Madame Bovary seem inevitable or impossible. Flaubert had all the privilege in the world, or he had all the bad luck. And, less universally, we've all had times where we felt we were obviously hard done by, but others assured us we weren't, or we've seen people balanced on the knife-edge.

So what must you, as the spirit of the recently deceased Dr. M., do? In a surreal afterlife, you need to look for closure in your own life. It's a long way off. You wind up revisiting the scene of your first euthanasia, your most famous one, and your last appointment. Along the way you meet an angel and devil. Each suggests you need to go with them. They're at a bar, and you need to fix the taps, so they each get a drink. Then there's a library, which amused me greatly--you've forgotten your own life, and in some cases, you need to look up information on people who died after you, because apparently you spent a lot of time sleeping in the afterlife. I wound up searching these people after climbing up and down a ladder to access their biographies, and the end result was a puddle of books on the floor.

This all feels like research, meaningful research, especially when paired with how you have to ask NPCs about all sorts of things, and while I hate full-blown amnesia games, the act of recovering your mortal past was quite fulfilling. I think this was also my first real exposure to abbreviated parser commands, where you could A (SUBJECT) instead of ASK ABOUT. As the years went by, I think I felt smarter and smarter that I'd figured it for myself. Oops!

When I finally visited my former patients, I actually messed up a few times. One has dementia, and I found the randomness of their response (you had to gain assent) favorably unsettling. I don't want to spoil the final one beyond saying it seems both tragic and logical, and once fame is part of the social calculus, it really sinks its teeth in and clouds moral clarity.

This isn't to say LDDM is a big long sermon. I love the surreal world it's in, with a door leading different places when unlocked with a different key. There are certain rules you find out in the afterlife, too. And there are swift dabs of humor, such as repeatedly ringing a bell to summon Death when Death's there. I love the denouements as a reward, too. It's not hard at all to figure the good, bad or neutral endings, which are effective. And in an odd way, it mirrors Cana According to Micah in that both can let you decide how good a person you feel you were.

LDDM is a long game, and I don't blame you if you pull out a walkthrough. When I replayed it, I went straight through and still slipped up, which led to some interesting sidelines. I can't even begin to discuss the morality of euthanasia, but I enjoyed the shades of grey this anything-but-grey game elicited, both when I played it in 2011 and now, when I revisited it. It was my favorite game I could vote on in IFComp 2011 (I tested Six) and I think its length may have turned some people off. But it gave a lot to think about, not just about life and death, but all those times you hoped you were doing things for the right reasons, or you wondered if someone else was, whether you liked or disliked them.

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Cana According To Micah, by Christopher Huang (as Rev. Stephen Dawson)

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Surprisingly touching Biblical apocrypha, January 26, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

I probably wasn't ready for CATM back in 2011, the first year I really tried reviewing IFComp games. I was just trying to get through all the comp games, and this one pushed back at me, but not in the "oops, I'm broken" way. So I couldn't help I was missing something. Everything seemed a bit off to me: even the pen name, Rev. Stephen Dawson, seemed like a pedantic boor who debated endless theological points enough to scare people from church. Anna, an NPC, behaved cluelessly and almost annoyingly, yet she was trying to help. It seemed.

And there was a wedding feast, which I can only assume was the 30 AD equivalent of a cocktail party. (I don't like weddings.) This probably contributed to CATM being dinged a bit in the final standings. But I sat down and found several ways through it, such as they were, and -- well, looking back, I'm not surprised the author went on to publish a novel later, one that appears in my local library system, no less.

CATM isn't a big game. The mansion where you serve is just eight rooms, and the other bits are more straightforward. Yet it took a good deal of diligently fighting through the in-game hints to push through--they don't spoil everything, and I think they even manipulate you into trying things you otherwise wouldn't. I could complain that they don't appear or disappear when they should, but maybe it's my fault for losing faith that early. But you have to manipulate people in order to move the plot. Jesus/Joshua apparently isn't thrilled about the whole turn water-to-wine thing, and unless he has strong motivation, he's not going to. You can't convince him on your own. The whole water-to-wine thing is also subverted with an early puzzle, where you run into John, and, well, Jesus played a small trick on him. John deserved it.

Getting Joshua to perform a miracle without nagging is thus the main thrust of the story. You're sort-of aided by a young orphan named Anna (there are a lot of subtler anachronisms you may miss if just trying to solve CATM.) She causes a set of shelves to collapse, which seems awful, but it just says, okay, there's nothing at the top, so don't bother to look for a ladder. Later she becomes part of a small moral dilemma that leads to branching endings. In the main good one, Joshua lets you know that he isn't a stickler about some things, and you did right. Yet it's easy to imagine these days people with far less than Godlike powers deliberately putting subordinates into impossible positions. So that was an unexpectedly revealing moment.

It's never quite clear how far you are in the plot--you need some NPCs' help to point out other NPCs, and the upper-right, instead of "10/10," is in Bible verse format, which is sort of cute. So there's some ambiguity, but I think that's planned, because your fellow servants Amos and Martha are often sent to town to perform errands. There's a lot of personal interaction implied and required. Though the author deliberately leaves you hanging about one particularly tedious action before speeding it up drastically, as if to say, I don't want you to focus on that. It's not a miracle by any sense, but it's a benevolent way for the author himself to play God.

I missed a lot of the humor of CATM the first time through, and I'm glad I gave it another chance. Parts still feel a bit sticky years later, but I think that's more to the author's discretion. CATM doesn't let things happen too easily, and it nearly forces you to interact with the NPCs and try things to see what to ask about and gives you several chances to solve things as a decent person or as a jerk or worse. It's an interesting bit of speculative apocrypha that avoids crazy humor and asks some what-ifs within the story.

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The Troll and the Teddy, by Llewelyn 'NylePudding' Griffiths

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Maybe only one puzzle, but a sweet and funny one, January 25, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron 2019 CaveJam

Here's an old one: A troll sleeps in front of his cave. There's treasure inside. The troll won't give up said treasure unless you're clever.

The twist? He's not hostile in the least. You need to do him a small favor. The title may spoil it. His cave isn't very big, but it's lovingly laid out, with a treasure room and clothing room and even a book.

The main puzzle, how to wake up the troll and make friends, is not hard and may partially be spoiled by the title. But no matter. It's an economical game, and the puzzle, indeed, makes emotional sense. You simply help the troll sleep better. He's remarkably generous, but perhaps he had enough treasure, anyway.

I can see why a game like this placed in the bottom half of the Adventuron CaveJam, because it's not terribly complex, and there's not a lot of tension, but with the delightfully blocky just-so graphics and surprisingly charming goal, I had myself a good time. The competition would've been less without it, and if Adventuron keeps giving people the ability to produce games like that, I'm glad to have more of them to play.

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Slasher Swamp, by Robot

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Surprisingly fun, with perspective and a walkthrough, at least, January 25, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

We all have games like Slasher Swamp, ones that maybe aren't terribly good, but we played them and enjoyed them for what they were. Perhaps there were better games out there, but Slasher Swamp had a simple enough premise, and the world, while big, only had so many items and so many death traps. So when, on replaying it, I stumbled into an instadeath, I could just reload and try again.

The premise is: your truck (pickup, I assume) is headed for Miami on Spring Break when it breaks down in a swamp. There are all sorts of decrepit buildings and mazes to navigate. You need a combination of good luck charms and weapons to survive. There's little clue what you need if you stumble onto a fatal obstacle, though there's plenty of gore. Then you open another area, mostly through examining stuff and finding a tripwire. This all culminates in a battle in an otherwise innocuous straw hut in the corner of the map.

Along the way you find a severed head and revolver and even some useless items like a King of Spades and Queen of Clubs in an otherwise irrelevant area, which hinted at, perhaps, a few puzzles the author could not slip in before IFComp. Perhaps it's better that way. Too big, and Slasher Swamp would've lost its fun. Looting an abandoned house and gas station is enough. There's even an outhouse and, of course, a side-warping map with non-reciprocal directions. There's a secluded shack, too, not to be confused with the hut. The whole deal is surprisingly dry-goods (find item B in area A, then D in area C since B gives you protection,) and there really is a lack of subtlety. But it is fun for all that. The descriptions seem to beg you to be scared, but I have to admit, they have variety.

Replaying Slasher Swamp years after it was a sort of cult favorite in IFComp 2014 reminds me of other TV shows I enjoyed fondly, even if they weren't good. That one cartoon. Maybe even that one commercial that, these days, makes me smile more than the show it interruopted! You can't have a steady diet, but it has an undeniable enthusiasm and willingness to throw in everything that refreshes the spirit, if not indulged too often. Perhaps I'll have a different perspective seven years from now, in 2030. Somehow, though, it's more than the sum of its parts, and unironically better than you feel a game like this should be, which makes up for more highfalutin' games which miss the mark. We need a few like this. And I guess that's partly why I wrote a walkthrough and map for it years ago, so maybe when I'd need a break from the more mindbending stuff, I could have more simple enjoyments. I did. Maybe you will too.

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The Bible Retold: The Bread and the Fishes, by Justin Morgan and Celestianpower

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Oh, God! You delegator!, January 24, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

BR:BF is a fun game, if some of the puzzles misfire. It's a jokey retelling of Jesus feeding a crowd with bread and fish. You, as Jesus, need to actually find the bread and fish. It's a tricky prospect. There are people to be healed, and once they are, your Father above--well, he certainly lets you know what to do next. It's kind of a goofy joke I don't want to spoil, but it doesn't get old. No great theological arguments are broached.

Some of the puzzles require Biblical knowledge, and one sort of does--or you can use trial and error. It's based on the number of verses in each chapter of Mark, which seems a bit odd, and there's a bit of arithmetic too. While i like having numbers integrated into a puzzle, this felt like busy work to me, although it also gave the feel of a big, lost place, and it was sort of neat and different to put different priorities on things you needed to map. You then unsurprisingly have to do something based on a Bible verse.

This all is a bit odd and uneven. But there are neat moments of talking with the people you've healed and getting very modest favors back from them in search of your big grand meal. I am, however, glad I had David Welbourn's walkthrough as a crutch, so I could enjoy the humor scattered through the game, and I found it interesting enough to replay for what I saw in the AMUSING menu. Certainly I studied it harder than those old Bible verses.

Oh, the ending is a funny take on things. Crowds being crowds, what they do is sort of expected, and it makes for a satisfying denouement.

Though BRBF's puzzles seem forced, I did enjoy the general storytelling and world and humor involved even if it never soars. So I do quite recommend it, but keep a walkthrough handy so it's not too frustrating. Navigating the addresses in the village is an arithmetic grind.

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Pascal's Wager, by Doug Egan

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
What if God was one of six? Play this game and get your fix. Bleebleebloo, January 23, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Pascal's Wager is an odd one, for sure. But it looks into something I dared to think when I was younger: if there are a bunch of gods, we're even less likely to pick the right one. Is heaven that exclusive? Did you get part-credit if you picked the right one, sort of? Limbo, at least? So many religions had ways to X you out if you screwed up the One True Faith anyway, and the "everyone can make it" ones seemed to give a nice afterlife as a participation trophy. I admitted I sort of looked at which gave the most potential reward for the least effort, which was probably not a paradise-worthy musing.

Pascal's Wager takes a different tack. It's decidedly funny. You can ask WHO IS GOD right off the bat, and there's also an item that shows you who the real God is. This requires some trial and error, but it's the sort the game invites. Then, you have to act in accordance with the deity's wishes. The result is a game with a lot of really irrelevant-seeming items or paths through, with a core of stuff to do right and NPCs who are, somehow, grounded in what's really what. I found the Bacchus path quite funny indeed. I care not how theologically accurate it may be.

Until then, it's not terribly clear what exactly to do (maybe this is just the confusion of youth,) although there are locked doors and such that dare you to open them. You'll probably hit the (generous) time limit, at first, resulting in a lot of being sent to hell by God, who usually asks you a trappy "didn't you consider X?" question. You lose either way. As if omnipotence isn't enough, he has to make you feel helpless one last time. I have to admit, after figuring who God was, he blasted me for being all prayer and no action. Ouch! Well, at least he told me what I should have done.

The basic run-through is as follows: childhood, teenage years, and finally adulthood. Who God is each time doesn't affect the run-throughs, but some items just don't matter. Mechanically, it's more a game about sneaking around than about any deep philosophical musings. There's nothing too intimidating, especially the second time through. It's a rather fun adventure to find the name of the True God.

So there's a surprising amount of subversion built into finding the True God, and I suppose that's what spirituality is about -- controlled, sensible good questions. Even unlocking the hints is an amusing trivial exercise. Each subsequent replay feels a bit more conventional, though, and what felt like subversion turns into checking off on details just to get through and not make mistakes. Which may be a mechanical weakness, but it also brings to mind the sort of person who thought they were very, very clever questioning God's existence and not letting you question their good faith asking the question. PW even seems to poke fun at straining too hard for spirituality--two characters seem to satirize the concept of a guru very lightly.

I have to admit, on winning, I got the five other scenarios queued up for later. In other words, not right away. PW is very funny, but replaying too much too soon is a bit of a slog, and I needed to take time to sit back and enjoy having so many different paths through what seemed like a samey story on the surface.

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Present Quest, by Errol Elumir

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A few unrelated, odd puzzles that come together at the end, January 22, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron 2020 Christmas Comp

So about two-thirds of the way through Present Quest, I was baffled as to how and why it had won the Adventuron 2020 Christmas Jam. The puzzles seemed facile and, quite bluntly, a few things didn't add up. Everything was clunky and empty. Did nice graphics really go so far? Were the busy-work puzzles more captivating than I thought? The first puzzle, I needed a hint on, and I double-checked, and yeah, it was too obscure and vague! Then they got unrealistic. And what's up with the short names? Was I off-base, or we the fifteen people who rated the game? Why did I need the food and energy gauge, when they were so easy to recharge? I mean, yeah, content warning and such, and maybe people emphasized with the author, but a pity vote seemed too much. It was a bit odd the author latched on to a meme that peaked in 2008.

Well, by the end my perspective had changed. And it forced me to reconsider certain things about my own life. It made me think about my own time-wasters and why I did them, and whether or not they really helped. My past is probably different enough from yours that you will get something very different from it. Let's just say that I read the content warning, assumed a certain incident in the game was the bit referred to, and said "okay, that's bad, but I don't feel affected by things."

What is PQ at its core? To me, it felt like Progress Quest, where you progress just by having the app open, though I think there's a better explanation for the name in the spoilers than you finding a sligtly cringey Christmas present for Pel. It certainly gave me that idea that minimal progress was inevitable, and you were going through the motions. Even though, well, you have little things to keep you excited. You, Terry, have a ho-hum job that's not well-described. Your wife, Pel, cooks breakfast and takes the car in to have snow tires put on. One day she drives you. One day you take the bus.

Everything has a small puzzle weaved in. On the first day, you need to find a password to your computer. If you want, you can call Pel for hints. It was a bit tortuous the first time, and then when I thought I had the answer, I thought, no, that's silly, it's too short. A fellow named Gord came by and talked to me. He has no effect on the story, and the game warns you against talking to him, and boy do you get an earful if you ignore the game and TALK GORD twice in a row. (I skipped the first time.) The next day, on the bus, you have a small puzzle to figure the route number you need, and the photocopier is broken. Then you have a puzzle with trivial UNIX commands to shut down George Michael's "Last Christmas" playing in the office. Work goes by.

I managed to get better at the puzzles. But I was very close to saying, geez, really? A my lousy apartment game AND a my lousy job game, with because-it-is-there puzzles on top? But PQ seemed inoffensive, much like Terry himself, so it couldn't hurt.

Then the incident happened, and things went to smash, but not in the way expected. And, well, the realization--it didn't hurt, but it tripped off a few things from my own life, of personal crutches I'd kept and thrown off. I was impressed enough by PQ that I want to spoiler-tag the critical bits, but again, I'd encourage you to play through it. As for a walkthrough? I was planning to write one for CASA, just to give Adventuron games more coverage. But since all you have to do is call Pel repeaetedly. You do feel a bit naggy, and that's the point.

(Spoiler - click to show)Hm. Okay. I don't want it to be that easy. ROT13.com will decode the next line below.

Jryy, fbeg bs. Rnpu cnentencu orybj unf n qvssrerag ahzore va gur Pnrfne Pvcure. Gurer'f n jnl gb svther vg bhg bgure guna ol oehgr sbepr. Ohg V qb jnag gb tvir n ovg bs n ohssre gb jbex guebhtu vg, naq V unir ibvqrq fbzr cnegf bs gur cybg. Naq V jnagrq gb unir fbzrguvat gurer gb funer jvgu crbcyr jub'ir svavfurq CD, gb pbzcner abgrf. V ubcr vg'f abg gbb zrna naq va gur CD fcvevg. V pna'g cebzvfr nal rzbgvbany eriryngvba, gubhtu.

Drobo kbo drsxqc S nyx'd gkxd dy pybqod pbyw wi ygx vspo, dyy. Wkilo droi gobo zbylvowc sx wkdr myxdocdc drkd S qyd, grsmr gobo dbsmui, led S pyexn k gki. Kvcy, drobo gobo dro mrocc qkwoc, grobo S zvkion kx yzoxsxq yb grkdofob, grobo S pyexn k xsmo mywlsxkdsyx dy zevv drsxqc yed. S nsnx'd bokvvi gkxd dy pybqod drow, ofox grox S vkdob zed drow sxdy k mywzedob drkd dybo wi wyfoc kzkbd. Kxn grox S myevnx'd psqebo cywodrsxq yed kd gybu, yb wkilo ofox grox S gkc zbyqbkwwsxq cywodrsxq pyb wicovp, drkd'c grox S grox S qyd lkmu dy, kxn sd qkfo wo k lsd yp k lyycd. Led dro lyycd rkn nswsxscrsxq bodebxc dy cmkvo. Kvv droco wowybsoc wki xyd lo kc dbokcebon kc k czyeco iye vyfon, led kvv dro ckwo, droi gobo czomskv dy wo. Zobrkzc droi gobo dyy czomskvsjon dy zecr pybgkbn, kxn cywodswoc dro kmd yp bowowlobsxq drow gkc wybo nbksxsxq drkx S dryeqrd. Drobo gobo ofox yvn qkwolyyuc S lyeqrd yx oLki, tecd dy rkfo kqksx, kxn drobo gkc yxo zkdr drbyeqr, kxn dro zejjvoc gobox'd rkbn, kxn grox S qyd drbyeqr gsdryed k wscdkuo, S oxtyion dro wowybi, led S nsnx'd poov cwkbd. Kxn sp S woccon ez, S gyxnobon, qycr, kw S vycsxq sd?

Pdana sana okia reypkneao, pkk. Oawnydejc bkn khz huneyo wjz oknp kb ieo-naiaixanejc pdai wjz dwrejc Ckkcha pqnj pdai ql wjuswu--cnawp! Dawnejc pda okjc wcwej wjz nawhevejc E'z bknckppaj sdwp E hkkgaz ql, pdwp E oskna E'z naiaixan xaywqoa kb ykqnoa pda oejcan owez pdwp--kqyd! Xqp ep swo lnkcnaoo wjz hawnjejc. Wjz E dwz w ykskngan sdk odksaz ia w lnkfayp kb deo ej Y. Ep ykjranpaz w opnejc kb jqixano wjz klanwpkno pk w jqixan qoejc LAIZWO. E pdkqcdp E ykqhzj'p zk ep, E swoj'p jawnhu wzrwjyaz ajkqcd, wjz da owez E ykqhz, eb E ows ep necdp, wjz E dahlaz dei sepd okia kzz eilhaiajpwpekj zapweho. Da habp pda ykilwju odknphu wbpan, wjz bkn w sdeha, E skjzanaz "dks zez da zk pdwp," wjz kjya E becqnaz pdejco kqp, ep swo okiapdejc pk ck xwyg pk. Wjz ep dahlo pk pdeo zwu wo wj atanyeoa pk hawnj w jas lnkcnwiiejc hwjcqwca. Xqp ep swoj'p qjpeh E wllheaz ep pdwp ep dahlaz ia ikra bknswnz--pda ykjbezajya xkkop bnki owuejc "kd, pdwp'o dks da zez pda xwoeyo" skna kbb.

Qdt jxuhu muhu xebbem lysjehyui qbedw jxu mqo. Veh ydijqdsu, yj'i fhujjo uqio je adem xem je wuj weet qj VhuuSubb, rkj Y mekbt iehj ev huluhj je yj, qdt ulud myddydw q vum wqcui yd q hem tytd'j vuub weet. Eh jxuhu qhu/muhu fqydj-ro-dkcruhi fkppbui mxuhu Y adum jxu rqiys ijhqjuwo qdt mqid'j fkixydw vehmqht. Y cqo'lu beeaut temd ed Juhho'i vehckbqjut fkppbui, rkj Y xqt co emd.

O makyy oz'y zngz cge cozn Zkxxe, zuu. Noy jksktzog sgjk oz ngxj zu xkskshkx znotmy, gtj znay zu ju noy cuxq vxuvkxre (vkxngvy Hkxz gtj Muxj mobk nos yorre zgyqy/vaffrky yu Zkxxe jukyt'z yzxgot nosykrl cozn xkvuxzy) haz yurbotm vaffrky mgbk nos g iutlojktik huuyz ux inkkxkj nos av, atzor znke jojt'z gtj iuarjt'z, hkigayk znke ckxk zuu lgx ot znk vgyz gtj nk tkbkx subkj luxcgxj. Oz'y yigxe nuc znoy ngvvkty kbkt coznuaz jksktzog--O'bk gryu ngj se uct Muxjy gz cuxq cnu jojt'z yzuv zgrqotm, gtj ngbotm urj vxuhrksy zu irkgx se nkgj ul znkox iutbkxygzouty cuxqkj, atzor znke jojt'z. Oz'y grr bkxe ixakr kbkt ol eua jut'z ngbk jksktzog--xkgjotm urj yzall eua cxuzk, gtj cutjkxotm nuc eua znuamnz ul zngz, znuamn znk grzkxtgzobk oy "O cgyt'z znotqotm ghuaz sain, cgy O?" Yuskzosky O'bk igamnz seykrl ruuqotm gz znk Cgehgiq Sginotk lux nuc O luatj g ikxzgot vokik ul tuyzgrmog zngz O luxmuz zu huuqsgxq, gtj oz lkkry muuj zu xkzxgik gtj lomaxk znotmy uaz, gtj ekz O qtuc oz cgy zosk cgyzkj tuz lomaxotm uznkx tkgz tkc znotmy. Ux O cutjkxkj cnu zngz yammkyzkj lxoktj cgy, yuskutk O ynuarj qtuc, gtj oz noz sk g lkc jgey rgzkx. O qtuc znkxk oy yzall cuxzn rkzzotm mu ul, haz grr znk ygsk, znk lkkrotm ul ruyy oy gclar.

Ylb ugrf Rcppw'q nsxxjcq qncagdgayjjw zsgjr ypmslb fgq nyqr ylb rfgleq rfyr kyic fgk fynnw, dpmk qmkcmlc cjqc, ucjj ... wms ayl dccj fmu fgq zmyr fyq zccl qgligle dmp y ufgjc. Wms umlbcp ufyr'q lcvr. Ylb rfcl, md amspqc, Npcqclr Oscqr bmcql'r kcyl y npcqclr, zsr rfc npcqclr. Ylb ufgjc Rcppw zmsefr fgq hsqr zcdmpc rfc qfmn ajmqcb, fc lctcp emr y epgn ml rfc npcqclr. Ylb rfc rpslayrcb lykcq dgr gl ucjj ugrf fmu Rcppw ayl mljw npmacqq qm ksaf.

Mzp iuft Fqddk'e bgllxqe ebqouruomxxk nguxf mdagzp tue bmef mzp ftuzse ftmf ymwq tuy tmbbk, rday eayqazq qxeq, iqxx ... kag omz rqqx tai tue namf tme nqqz euzwuzs rad m ituxq. Kag iazpqd itmf'e zqjf. Mzp ftqz, ar oagdeq, Bdqeqzf Cgqef paqez'f yqmz m bdqeqzf, ngf ftq bdqeqzf. Mzp ituxq Fqddk nagstf tue vgef nqradq ftq etab oxaeqp, tq zqhqd saf m sdub az ftq bdqeqzf. Mzp ftq fdgzomfqp zmyqe ruf uz iqxx iuft tai Fqddk omz azxk bdaoqee ea ygot.

(Ghmx: rhn vhnew ybznkx patm mh khmtmx ur ybznkbgz patm max exmmxk B fnlm ux. Xoxg by B inm bm bg ehpxk-vtlx, rhn'w atox t tgw b tl lbgzex phkwl. Matm'l fr vhgmkbunmbhg mh max pahex insser ubm.)

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Nose Bleed, by Stanley W. Baxton

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Oh hey! A metaphor I think I got! One I could apply to life, too!, January 22, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

Nose Bleed was my clear favorite of the Texture games I played in IFComp, and I feel it is likely very worth the relatively little time to play through it. The bits that necessitate the content warning are not just there for street cred, too--they provide the right sort of discomfort, not "look how I can gross people out" but more "yeah, I've been there, even if I couldn't have admitted it before I started." The metaphor for the gore is pretty clear. Or, well, the main one I saw.

NB starts off as a "my lousy job" entry (an upper-class one, perhaps, but still lousy) which quickly aims for meaningful absurdism which, from my perspective, hits the mark. There are graphics at the right places, with some sort of vector-ish effect. Given the game's title, it's not too much of a spoiler to mention there are small blood splashes and lines of blood running down. Gritty realism in the blood trails is absent but unnecessary: the trailing line is straight, and the splashes are perfect circles.

This all leads to a puzzle at the end which may feel old hat or a cop-out once Texture is more mature, perhaps the Twine version of "pick the right link in a whoe maze of them." However, since I haven't played many Texture games, it's extremely effective, and if it does become a cliche, I'm glad it wasn't when I played NB. You feel as though you're fumbling in the dark for an escape, and it's the reason a walkthrough is included in the game. Even if you know what to do at the end, you don't quite know what to do.

This makes NB as much more than a "my lousy job" or "I hate my co-workers" fly-by. Details are left out on purpose. You have spontaneous nosebleeds. You try to ignore them. You fail. They stop, soon enough, but the damage is done. Someone notices. They pin you down a bit. They may be a competitor, or a supervisor. There's a flashback. Expensive fabrics are involved. No matter what you do, it feels like you did the wrong thing. You'd like to run away or explain yourself or feel too cool to, but "you are too cowardly to be cowardly."

I've had few nosebleeds in real life, but I've picked a zit at the wrong time and not noticed I'd cut myself shaving until I got to work. Okay, I noticed before, but I thought I'd stopped the blood. But of course the blood in NB isn't just blood. I think we all have that area where we feel completely socially incapable, and we can't shake it, and the narrator does, too. There's that awful secret we don't want revealed, but if we take deliberate steps to cover it, someone could play detective and eventually figure what we were trying to cover. We worry we might be embarrassing others. Or ourselves. And yet, the people most likely to mention we are embarrassing them, well, they seem to be embarrassing us back, right? For me the story built to a very plausible "embarrass or be embarrassed" scenario. It brought to mind a lot of people who could on the one hand say "this hurts me more than it hurts you" and "you're embarrassing yourself more than you're embarrassing me, but it's still too much."

The ending may be open to interpretation, and perhaps it's the sort of surprise twist that isn't a surprise if you've read or played enough, but one part is very clear: the final person berating you spontaneously gets nosebleeds, too. This reminded me of people who said "Oh, X who is mocking you has their problems, too, you know, so don't judge them too harshly." It isn't clear how harshly we should judge X. But certainly there's latitude for saying, enough, already. Some people can't, or they can't point out others' obvious flaws, or don't want to, or it isn't in good taste. Or perhaps X had seemed to learn to deal with their own phobias, with jokes. Or perhaps X was someone on an Internet forum or twitter or wherever who was up front about their social anxiety, so up front they'd note other people didn't have nearly the barriers they did, so you all really need to stop whining for your own good. In any case, the big reveal allowed me to dislike my antagonist without judgment. On replay, I realized that was the sort of person I'd like to be indifferent to, and I've gotten better over the years.

These are my somewhat filtered-for-review thoughts. Nose Bleed's crisp presentation brought moments of where adults may even have told me "X has problems too!" I felt guilty wanting to call these people out and failing, mean at how I wanted to lash out, and cowardly because I didn't. The author isn't explicit about their sympathies, though I suspect they lean towards the player. You do have to note people like your assailant have their own problems, but they also have to fix them, and if they assert power over you, why should you help them?

Given all this, NB was much better than someone very, very well-meaning saying "oh you know bullies are empty inside" or "they only pick on you out of insecurity" or even "I understand, but don't let it get you down!" And I realized something else: it doesn't resort to ALL CAPS, which is such a temptation when discussing social anxiety and, I'd guess, a metaphoric nosebleed on its own.

I had several short reflections mid-game of saying oh geez yes it can be horrible like this. But then I had a much quicker bounce-back than I might have had ten years ago. There were people from my past the antagonist reminded me of. I didn't have things like NB to help me take a step back and see through their charades. It's too late to push back at them, but at least NB helps me push them further out of my mind. Looking back on the blurb, it's hard not to laugh at the experience of playing NB and, yes, at some people who said something similar years ago.

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The Bible Retold: The Lost Sheep, by Ben Pennington

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Simple game with cute auto-walkthrough feature, January 21, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Lost Sheep entered in the first IFComp where I judged. I was kind of shocked to see that, yes, a lot of IFComp games could be both relatively simple and satisfying.

In this case, there was a simple game where you needed to find your one lost sheep of a hundred. The sheep's a bit reticent, as while it's pretty clear where it went (the game is not big,) it bounces between locations. The puzzle was a bit of a trick--fortunately there aren't too many items, and the puzzle is more about ancient history and progress than the Bible. Then there's a fun part where you are blocked by water buffalo.

But what stuck with me was that, well, you could type WALKTHROUGH not just for a walkthrough but for the commands remaining! I thought about this trick a lot. How did they do it? After some thinking, I realize it wasn't terribly esoteric, but it was a neat bit of engineering I'm a bit disappointed more games haven't implemented. Perhaps it would only get the player so far, so the text didn't scroll off the screen.

This doesn't make BRLS a blockbuster, but it provides a niche. It's all very pleasant, even with funny things to try once you've won. They don't bring the house down, but together, they add light-hearted deaths and even some odd fourth-wall stuff. Perhaps I'm biased favorably because I remember the puzzle to get through, but I still find BRLS something neat to go back to just to poke around. I'm on the fence about if that's mainly due to the WALKTHROUGH response, but either way, it's a short fun time.

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One Way Ticket, by Vitalii Blinov

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Captivating and odd and flavorful, January 20, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

The cover art biased me early. It was obviously a train on the front cover but not quite like one I'd ever seen. Quirky the right way. But there was more than cover art–the in-game pictures reminded me of Tove Jansson, and so did the writing. (If you don't know who Tove Jansson is, please do stop by your local library and read all the Moomintroll books as soon as possible!) The plot and puzzles and layout are great, too. And though I didn't get through OWT, I loved what I saw, and given how well put together it is, I sense I'm missing something silly. Somehow, between the end of IFComp and posting this review, I didn't figure it, either. I need to fix that. But I saw enough even getting halfway through!

OWT is set in a nonsense land in its own rules, where you take a train, but your trip is derailed halfway through. It's unclear why, but you debark in front of a very, very odd town. The mayor seems very uninterested in greeting you, so off you go to explore a store with legs (it walks away after dark) and visit some very odd characters indeed. But it's the best sort of oddity that never feels forced, and the translation gives a unique voice native English speakers would sound very artificial mimicing. For me it reinforced how far-away this place must be.

I'm still fuzzy on some aspects of why things are happening, but I suspect things will be revealed once I find my way through. It's been fun to learn the town's history and how it wouldn't fly in the real world, but it would clearly make sense to those living there for a while. A key mechanic is changing your free room at the tavern from day to night based on the puzzles. You switch out a moon and sun in a painting. This was reassuring to me–I didn't need to worry about messing up or taking too long–and it also fit in with "look! The natives are helpless!" Townspeople have bizarre reasons for not transporting you palces you need to go, and there are jackals who appear at night. One very fun scene has an NPC scare some of them away so you have a few more places to visit. It's even legitimately creepy to explore at night!

I got stuck trying to find golden sand and trying to help a man with four right arms get his pedicab going. (Just walking didn't work, due to some existential woes.) Then there was the gambling game I knew was rigged. These barriers and frustrations amused me immensely, and I don't know if any other comp entry has hit this nerve so well, and I'm eager to see more.

One word about the interface. It's not immediately obvious, but once you see how it works, it makes sense. The text for each location has clicky bits that either lose all their links (a compass appears below to show a big picture map to pick your next location) or just let you cycle between the scenery--this gets a bit awkward as you open more locations, and it would be nice to jump, but this is quibbling. A notepad in the upper left, when highlighted, lets you remember clues you picked up, and a knapsack in the upper right lets you use items. Clicking on the location lets you save a game. At first I panicked when I didn't see how or when to save (it's quite possible I skimmed the instructions) but quickly I acclimated–and I was glad not to have even the hint of a save/restart menu tarnishing the fantasy world I was in! TLDR: the visual design is very effective, and maybe it can't be used everywhere, but I hope OWT inspires others to improve their own.

OWT feels like it might not get the attention it deserves because 1) it has a custom format (I think) and is hosted outside IFComp and 2) it is translated. And there is one instance where the translation misleads the player–the "say goodbye" option in the tavern actually means "don't talk to the owner this time," and there's one instance where being called "buddy" feels jarring and too condescending and "friend" would've worked. These are very subtle degrees of connotation, though, and if something was lost in translation, well, what's left is very special, and we have more than enough. I've never been as disappointed in myself for not finishing a game as I have for OWT. It's legitimately, organically odd, the sort of oddness that won't jump in our face and beg us to experience it fully now for our own good or be stuffy squares for eternity. In other words, the kind our souls need more of.

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Chesstopia II, by John C. Knudsen

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Chess and time travel, but I want more, January 20, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

The author of the Peter Patzer series decided, after a long hiatus, to switch things up a bit. The Chesstopia series is a bit more serious, focusing on actual improvement and spreading appreciation of chess, and it doesn't have some of the parser bugs and helter-skelter feel that made Peter Patzer charming in its own way. The whole series shouldn't be very intimidating. I felt C2 was probably the most substantial of the three, but it should not take more than a half-hour.

The plot is this: Caissa, the chess Goddess who set you on the path to chess enlightenment in Chesstopia, has informed you that nobody can play chess because a bishop from her personal collection of sets is missing. Harsh, but she makes the rules.

Your quest consists of poking around the area. You have three stats: happiness, a chess rating, and strength. (Spoiler - click to show)None of these matter, and, in fact, they seem to increase or decrease your stats randomly. The time machine is the main attraction here. With it you visit historical figures and play chess with them--or not. Figuring whom to challenge and whom to evade is the main mechanical crux of C2. You have a few moral decisions, and once that's over, you report back to Caissa. You can actually fetch the missing bishop but lose.

This doesn't make C2 very replayable, beyond the slightly harsh but amusing insteadeaths. The first time through, though, it is fun to poke around, and it appears to be a lot less on rails than C1 or C3. Given how quickly the game ended once I found the bishop, I'd have hoped for more interaction with the NPCs crowded around Caissa at your home base, when mostly. There were all kinds of ideas I wish had been developed.

The other two entries are worth playing if you are a fan of chess, but the choices are a bit too obvious at times. Here there's imagination and conflict and a bit of loss, and you don't feel like being asked "Come on, you want to win, here, right?" C2 is fun for what it is, and it seems like the author had much more to offer, especially since they hosted a correspondence chess website. The conflicts of long games versus short games, tricks versus general knowledge, and so forth, seem like fertile ground that could keep non-chessplayers interested, stuff that might even be natural to the author but they might blow off as "but everybody knows that." (They don't! Experienced chess players forget that, yes, the Opera game or even Scholar's Mate was neat when we first saw it.) Instead C2 feels just a bit like wish fulfillment, though it's a wish I might not mind, either. Maybe Chess Limbo is where it's really at.

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Darkiss! Wrath of the Vampire - Chapter 2: Journey to Hell, by Marco Vallarino

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Blasphemin' 2: Hellacious Boogaloo, January 19, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

In Darkiss 2, you're still Martin Voigt, the vampire. You've taken revenge on all the peons. So who's left? Well, the people you're fighting for power in the lowerarchy. The object? Acquire immunity from sunlight, no small task or boon. If all goes well, you'll meet Lilith, your creator and dream woman of sorts. Talk about moving up in the netherworld!

There's no direct violence, but malicious gift-giving fits just right in with a text adventure about bad people, and that's what happens. Oh, and every single room suggests physical, moral or emotional darkness. It's really gothic, but fortunately, it's not goth-kid.

The puzzles are a bit different, too. You have a few powers. You can become different things, such as the fog, a wolf, or a bat. Each has obvious restrictions but also abilities you need to find the very evil relics that you need to kill the very evil people who also like to kill and torture innocent people, though that's where your solidarity ends. Power-sharing and consensus-building aren't their way.

It's about twenty-five rooms all told, and many are just there for one puzzle, so it's not a huge game. And I'm impressed with the variety of puzzles and artifacts. For instance, at the start, there's a mountain, and it's pretty clear you'll have to change form to get to the top. Along the way you learn lore of the next horrible person to summon and how they'll probably kill you unless you're able to fool them. You even resurrect your old love, Sabrina, which is not particularly sappy. It's all part of the business of revenge. There's someone else to manipulate, and I'm impressed with how I was alternately disturbed and engrossed. The climax is a sequence of horrible acts that make perfect sense and tie some loose ends together.

This is all very well done. Part of me was disappointed you didn't use some forms more, or you only really hypnotized (your other power) one person. But I also realize that for this sort of chaos and evil-person-doing-evil-things, there's a point where it becomes too much. So much turns regular stories on its head--Martin finds a sword in a lake, which is like Excalibur except the opposite. And other puzzles are genuinely neat, such as bringing an item I wouldn't touch as a mortal down a mountain. And the NPCs make Darkiss 2 feel a bit fuller--even the brief bit with the vengeful Reverend Bauer left an impression on me, when I both killed him and let him kill me. Other deaths are worth visiting, too.

The story ends with a promise of Darkiss 3, where apparently Professor Anderson may get his revenge. This seems fitting, and I think the change of persepctive would fill in some holes nicely. Martin has been horrible enough, and I'm not sure what's left to do except maybe tackle Beelzebub himself. I'd be interested to see how Professor Anderson navigates Martin's immunity to sunlight, and how Martin plans to seize the day(light). Darkiss 2 doesn't have the obvious laughs Darkiss did, but I found it more involving, and if Darkiss 3, whenever it's published, matches up to either, it'll be worth the wait. The Darkiss games, being in text, have given me a sort of horror I couldn't take in movie form and even given me some surprising new angles on evil, how different types cooperate, and how to fight it.

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The Adventures of Peter Patzer, Who Sought Masterhood and Returned Not Quite the Same, by John C. Knudsen

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Win at chess just once: the text adventure, January 19, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

I was glad to discover a chess game of sorts. Peter Patzer isn't particularly enlightened, but it has a few good jokes, and it's self-contained enough that certain places where I had to guess ran out of possibilities quickly. It feels like there were opportunities missed, but that's to be expected since AGT was relatively new when the author wrote this. Oh, and the author did a lot of work on AGT himself. It's tough to write both core code and stories at once.

PP isn't a huge game. It has fourteen rooms, ten of which are traps that force you to answer general-knowledge questions. Along the way, you will find the ghost of Alekhine, as well as actual people in Johnnie the janitor and a shady postman/operator and Slimy Harry the Hustler. He will beat you on the board if you play him, and also, he will kill you within nine moves whether or not you play him. The solution to make him disappear is a bit of a stretch, but it got a laugh out of me once I saw what to do. Also, I was amused you lost points if you played him in blitz chess. You can keep playing him for $10 even though you only have $10 on you.

Harry's aggression is one of two deaths--in fact, PP is polite on the Zarfian cruelty scale, as you can undo, for one move at least. (A limitation of AGT.) The other is on the sidewalk outside the chess club. You can walk into traffic, which is very Leisure Suit Larry, but without the theme song you can whistle along to.

PP certainly has its oddities. It's funny, in retrospect, the hidden room where the real people play (away from patzers like you,) even though none of them are implemented, which is a pity, because the room description offers so many possibilities. And certainly the concept of improving in chess does, too--how do you find adequate openings? Can you learn to mate with king and queen, or king and rook? Maybe you can learn a few middlegame tricks, not just so you can catch others, but so you avoid getting caught.

It really just boils down to a few quizzes, though. Get enough right, and the ghost boots you to the next area. Some are covered in a red book you find early on. Another is odd trivia I don't know as a pretty good chess player. And others bowdlerize the concept a bit: for instance, it's cool to know a knight can mate against a pawn, but here it's a yes/no question you can answer again without penalty, and you never see how.

That said, it was entertainment, if more thana bit rickety. The opponent you finally beat brought a chuckle out of me, especially considering the strides in technology since PP was written. Alas, the promised sequel never materialized. At least not with Peter Patzer along. I noticed the author wrote a Chesstopia series in Twine, and perhaps I should look into that. It's been a while since the author wrote PP, so they probably have a clearer vision of what they really want by now.

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Darkiss! Wrath of the Vampire - Chapter 1: the Awakening, by Marco Vallarino

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
An old-school supernatural comedy of grandiose entitlement, January 17, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

There's no shortage of text adventures where you play as a self-absorbed person who just wants stuff. Some are truly crude. Others are a bit too subtle. Some feature a kid who hasn't matured yet. And Darkiss, well, it features someone who's been around a good while. Martin Voigt, a vampire who has been imprisoned in his coffin by mere villagers. He doesn't want much. He just wants to even the score with, well, everyone who ever got in the way of him chasing his dark pleasures!

There's also been no shortage of "see the other side" works in IFComp. Under the Bridge, from this year (2022,) is one example. It helps humanize someone or smomething that is, on the surface, unlikable. i wish you were dead shows someone with apparent proof a lover cheated, but then it is not so clear what happened or who is at fault. And The Best Man from 2021 presents the mental machinations of a covert narcissist in shocking, disturbing "oh yuck I've been like that in what I hope are my very worst moments" ways.

Darkiss sees the other side, all right, but it neglects such nuance. The character is unapologetically awful and entitled and ruins the lives of mere mortals as he pleases. There are the ones who give him direct pleasure as he drinks their blood, and there are ones who get in the way, like the villagers who shut him in his coffin. Why, it drained him of his powers! Getting them back seems like the least he deserves. Well, to him.

Standard vampire tropes are at play here. You gain power by rediscovering your vampire get-up, complete with accessories. You need to summon demons even more powerful than yourself. All this can and should be disturbing, but the author laid a lot of clues to show he's winking at you and he knows the main character does not, in fact, deserve actual sympathy. Some dialogue with NPCs (Dracula was a good book, but what a sad ending) reinforces this as well. Plus, he, like, plays the violin and stuff! If that's not classy, what is?

Other humor is direct, yet not blunt. I almost feel the pain of the vampire who can't cross garlic fields or get the best of a mirror. There's a bit where his mind's a bit rusty, so he mis-counts the number of bats in the Bats room. And there's the appalling unfairness of how Doctor Anderson outfoxed Martin, and how Sabrina, your love from before you were captured, didn't make it!

Darkiss's puzzles are a bit old-school, which is fine with me. But they're mixed up well. It starts with almost a quiz, which gets you one point, and you work your way up to a 9-point puzzle at the end, indicating that, yes, it does get a bit trickier. Most every point scoring command has a different verb.

Darkiss, given its original Italian publication date of 2010, seems like a very clever and snappy response to the awful Twilight series of books. It wasn't a necessary reply, and it takes a decidedly different tack than the more focused parodies I read and enjoyed. It contains no darkly evil laughter and vows to rule the world one day with one's minions. It simply contains a protagonist who sees a lot and plans a lot and accounts for nearly everything except, well, the people he draws his energy from have a far shorter lifespan than he does, but still, he's entitled, because reasons. Playing along with the supernatural eternally spoiled brat is disturbing fun. And yet you feel the pain of Professor Anderson and the villagers in the face of such a menace.

The term "energy vampire" may not have been in widespread use in 2010, but it's certainly more prominent today. And I couldn't help but think of how Martin Voigt's exploits magnified the acts of some people I disliked. Darkiss went beyond just poking fun at vampire tropes to remind me of some people who, well, darned near drained everyone around them but felt aggrieved people didn't understand them enough and took extraordinary measures to keep their aura strong. Oh, the knowledge they sought! (Okay, we've all been drains on other people. Yes, that includes me. But I'm talking about the people who've honed their craft.) The text borders on actual text dumps, but the author seems to know just when to stop--it's like that coworker who you're about to tell "enough, don't bother me with chat for a week," but then he stops at the right time, which is kind of disappointing after five minutes, because you realize you kind of wanted an excuse to cut him off.

Only when Darkiss stops at the right time, it's more benevolent. It generally understands when a joke might fray and pushes you on to the next bit. And while my eyes glazed over at some bits, I could see myself gladly replaying in a few years' time to revisit just the sort of thing that shouldn't have worked for me on paper, but it did.

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A Long Way to the Nearest Star, by SV Linwood

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
An odd not-quite-friendship, big picture tech-futzing, deep-diving anthropology, January 17, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

I left some really good entries for the end of IFComp 2022, and LWNS was one of them. I confess, I bumped it to the back, because the subject seemed flat to me. Science fiction? Near-vacant ship? A sabotage mystery? Not my cup of tea. Plus there was an indication you had to deal with an AI. I put on my jargon-ducking helmet, only to find I didnt need it. LWNS wound up reminding me more of a buddy-cop sitcom than anything else. Not that it's full of jokes, but there's great interplay between the player-character, a thief whose own spaceship is on the blink after a hyperwarp to escape galactic police, and SOLIS, the AI in a host ship that the thief finds as fuel is low. SOLIS has kept the host ship going– well, sort of–with all the occupants dead. So there's a whodunit in addition to technical footing.

SOLIS's sarcasm and reticence to help with simple tasks suggests malfeasance, but unfolding the big answers isn't that easy. Fortunately, navigation is. While it's ostensibly a big ship, there are areas shut down for security purposes, so that helps with focus. You can visit the living quarters, but the core is off-limits. You need to not only butter SOLIS up the right way, but you need to discover evidence in datapads left by crew members. There's some finagling here. SOLIS knows who you are, being AI and all, but if you have the right passwords, there's not much it can do. It understands deeper things may be at work, and it understands there are things it doesn't understand. Oh--and passwords are inventory items you don't have to remember. Yay, anti-pedantry.

So you can focus on big picture stuff, like cleaning out the lab, where there were some important experiments. It's nice that things like getting the flashlight to work are done from an intuitive item menu. You use something, and if it's in the right place, it works, and unneeded items are discarded. The cluing's pretty good, too–at one point you need to fix a janitorbot, and even though there's a lot of futuristic technology, the puzzle's very much big-picture. The Internet having manuals for download is great, but here

It becomes increasingly obvious the deaths were not accidental, and as it does, your ability to call SOLIS is hampered. The game often suggests you may not want to ask a potentially hostile AI about THAT. And you don't, and there's usually a neat workaround. Then an action sequence at the end to defeat a weird monster provides an unexpected opportunity to cooperate with SOLIS, where it quite believably can't grasp what you're doing, or why, probably because its AI wasn't built for quick-thinking combat.

It's only near the end that you learn what SOLIS stands for. It doesn't really matter, and this is reiterated beforehand, but by that time you've gotten to know it well enough, you feel you have to. The ending put SOLIS's early actions and words in a new light for me, too. It reminds me of that scene in Hill Street Blues where Becker, the tough cop, finally finds the real name of the guy who keeps giving aliases like William Shakespeare. And I walked away with a very human perception of what SOLIS was, what they did, and why they did it. I've, well, been there. It's a human experience we've all had, and here it's done with almost technological detachment, until you realize what the guilty party did, and how it would be wrong to do to a person, but they probably felt clever doing so to an AI. Cognitive dissonance for AI's is all I can say. And I find it interesting LWNS was written in 2022, before the 2022 Merriam-Webster Word of the Year was rolled out. As I see it, SOLIS understands snark, or at least the mechanics of snark. But it doesn't understand deeper, darker stuff. It was emotionally hard, having to explain that through LWNS, even though I just had to click on and option and didn't have to think up the words.

Long Way has, according to the walkthrough, several endings. I did not see them all. But the one relatively neutral one I found provided me with enough food for thought. I've certainly sat through a bunch of "two lovable rogues" productions that made me groan a bit, where I didn't love either, whether it's in science fiction or an action movie or whatever, and I got the feeling they'd not really bonded, or the parting was too melodramatic or whatever, or there was humor, which got laughs, but it missed profound stuff. I can't call Long Way super-profound, as it doesn't want to shake you with its profundity. But at its heart it's about two entities who didn't expect the improvement and understanding that they wound up getting from the experience. Neither did I.

Note on similar works: it feels like Star Trek: The Next Generation is low-hanging fruit, where Data tries to understand what it's like to be human. The computer makes a good, if unemotional, limerick. And there's definite tension as we see whether SOLIS is more like Data or Data's evil twin Lore. But I was surprised how much it reminded me of Tunes for Bears to Dance To, by Robert Cormier, maybe my favorite young adult author. Henry, the protagonist, experiences some very troubling things indeed, despite a lack of melodrama. I rarely have an IFComp entry cut across genres like this.

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According to Cain, by Jim Nelson

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Alchemical Biblical story, hold the excess moralizing, January 17, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

So I was worried AtC would go heavy on the Biblical stuff. Fortunately, there's more alchemy than Bible verse grinding. On the surface, you may be able to guess what happens. Abel feels like that guy back your one high school who'd laugh at other people making mistakes or at people who knew a bit too much, and the teacher never quite caught on. You wondered how he got such good grades, but the teacher liked him! Murder, of course, was out of the question, but given that the fifth commandments is more about "thou shalt not hate" than "thou shalt not kill" (boy, I felt guilty about all those fruit flies and house flies for a good long while!) one can see how a person might sympathize with Cain. Abel is perfectly okay with Cain getting some nice stuff. So perfectly okay, all things considered, that Cain had better not lash out at him back. You could even say Abel was the first troll, as he
seems to make a nice* mix of concern trolling, boredom trolling, etc.

The angle is a bit different–there's a neat fantasy/academic element involved with you being able to go back in the past and scrounge around for Cain and Abel, with an envelope you can open at any time to return. In the past you dabble in a bit of alchemy. You find swatches of substances like sulphur and salt and so forth, and at critical points, you blend them together to gain revelations. There's a good deal of crank science that the author knows is crank science, but it has a neat bit of logic to it. It revolves around there being four people and four ancient Greek humors.

You need to learn what sort of person Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel were, and each time you figure what combination of reagents to use on a special item, you access a new memory. There are sixteen total, which makes for a good deal of symmetry, good to have for such a big work–the memories themselves have mnemonics or feel organized. That extends to the spellcasting you have to do, which contrasted with Adam tried to use magic to find a way back to Eden. You also learn some basic spells, but thankfully it's nothing like, say, memorizing the Ten Commandments and its explanations to the word. (I so hated that in confirmation!)

Two risks with this sort of work are that they may feel too "look, I'm being accurately biblical" or "look at how brilliantly I'm reinterpreting things" and it never really got that way for me. I think using known and anacchronistic pseudoscience worked very well to establish a fantasy feel without going fully silly mode, and I enjoyed how the pacing of revealed memories worked, and I confess I sped things up with the walkthrough to see what happened next. It's almost like the author has done this sort of thing before but in a different medium! Near the end, one of the moments I thought could happen and be very heavy-handed felt appropriate.

AtC ran the risk of being slapdash and smart-alecky all along, in that "THE EVIL GUY WAS THE GOOD GUY ALL ALONG AND VICE VERSA, HAHA" manner, but given the revelations are more gradual and nuanced, there's no chance of it being a hot take. Certainly I wound up thinking about "nice" (well, I couldn't prove they were mean) people from my past I should've been closer with. Nobody got killed, but certainly there was a good deal of maneuvering from people who said "you don't deserve something this nice, but I do, no offense, I'm not looking down on you or anything."

Unlike Sunday school or confirmation lessons, I never felt pressure to remember silly details I didn't think I would use. I was grateful for I would actually want to learn things, to fill in the holes that aren't there, on replay, and I certainly wouldn't feel obliged to memorize things. So AtC brought up an angle beyond "yep, some people who should've been figurative brothers weren't, and whose fault is that?" And it also addressed things I figured I'd better shut up about or get excommunicated ("for the first people ever, wasn't incest necessary? And isn't that a sin?")

TADS entries in IFComp are very rarely middling, and this is probably a function of the Inform community being bigger than the TADS community, and how people may either choose TADS and not get as much support as they would with Inform, or they may look at TADS and Inform and decide TADS has some features Inform doesn't, and they get a lot of help in the forums because people have been waiting for someone to share with. (I just stuck with Inform, and I know I've had "well, it works well enough" moments where someone pointed out, yes, here is one way in which TADS is more robust.) AtC is clearly on the upper end, and for all its being steeped in the past with its plot, it leaves me looking forward too, well, a future where more TADS games are written, and there is a bigger TADS community. There could be so much to gain.

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Lucid, by Caliban's Revenge

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Unnerving supernatural powers beyond being able to retry endlessly, January 17, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

Loop-til-you-win Twine entries always interest me. They feel efficient and tidy. You have some feedback on what you're doing right, and you will have to lawnmower a bit, but there are places to skip. The gold standard of loop-til-you-win may be Spider and Web, but we don't have to scale those heights. "Keep poking until you get it right" works, if there are enough tries, and you are told–hey, this part isn't useful yet, or that other part is. Lucid has the added advantage of remembering critical things you did, so if you die, you don't start entirely from scratch. It seems to combine the best parts of save points and also giving you the freedom to do things wrong. This may not be perfectly realistic without an explanation. Lucid gives none, because it's trying to invoke surreal supernatural darkness, and I think it does so–it's also a small enough world that the lack of undo makes you feel helpless but not frustrated. I wound up feeling uneasy with the knowledge and powers I'd gained, and the main character seems blown away by the writing on a cereal box underscores that nicely. I prefer this sort of thing to physical descriptions of gore.

You're not told who you are, as you explore a dark city, but the false branches (it's easy to get killed or escape, neither of which is meant to seem satisfactory) make it pretty clear you're here to do something, to sit and fight. But what are you fighting against, and what are you fighting for? That's what you discover. And Lucid , written in poetry form, hides certain things and makes others clear. The part mentioned in the walkthrough–that you stack progress even after a death–doesn't seem to appear in-game, until there's something clear. Then, I felt like I was off to the races. There were some places that should be inert but weren't. Some deaths were of the "don't bother again" sort, others of the "it's not time yet." And there were in-game shortcuts too. There's a high-rise apartment you have to climb the first couple times, which set atmosphere, but all the same I was glad I didn't have to repeat that once I'd figured things out. There's a man on a park bench who'll help you out. It's not idyllic.

With each power or item you acquire, Lucid feels more constricting, and this makes sense, given the ultimate ending. You have a destiny, of sorts. Your character is slightly aware of their changes, but you the reader may be even more aware.

I can't speak to precisely how good the poetry is, but given that it had definite high points for me (the grocery store and the residential tower) I think it's more than just "hey, look, I decided to make a line break after every 6 words and give the finger to strict capitalization!" I think reviewers more competent at that than I addressed details elsewhere, but they found a lot to like (so to speak–the game is not lovable.) So did I. I found it a bit rough around the edges, but that seemed more due to ambition than inattention. So it was a very worthwhile experience for me. That first bit may seem forbidding, and you may wonder what you're doing here, but it's worth holding tight until you find that first clue.

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The Princess of Vestria, by K Paulo

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Well-executed medieval fantasy, January 17, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

I can't remember a medieval-fantasy IFComp entry executed as well as PoV. Often people write one just to try their hand at fiction, and it falls flat. And it may be the most entertaining game in IFComp 2022. Lost Coastlines borders on the surreal, and Only Possible Prom Dress has its share of wild puzzles where you will probably laugh at a few of them. But PoV reads like a fantasy novel, down to listing the chapter you're on, where you get to make choices and even fail. You get five lives, but with save/restore, you don't need them. It feels mainstream, which makes it a rarity for IFComp. It has no mind-blowing plot twists, but it has plenty of decisions to make and people to make and also has a neat ending where, the more friends you made, the more ways you have to win.

This is a winning formula for a lot of people, me included. You, as Princess Imelda, find your brother Prince Alexander has been poisoned. How, and why? Is it foreign intrigue or something magic?

A lot of the elements in here pop up in fantasy books: princess uses disguise to escape, princess is impeded by allies and enemies, princess befriends or works with someone initially hostile, princess is nice to poor person and gets unexpected aid, princess realized her royal family is potentially awful in ways she hadn't suspected. They're all combined for a fast-paced experience. You have choices whether to learn magic and when to use it, with a strong "it's the friends you make along the way" undercurrent. It reminded me a lot of the Lloyd Alexander books I read in my youth, except with graver risk.

Given that it's pretty easy to ditch certain companions (including your main one, whom I liked a lot. There's a very neat bit about him coloring his hair for disguise,) it might be fun to try and run through with them not around. It seems like complex work to decide which game-winning scenarios are allowable, and I'm quite curious if there's a way to lock yourself out of a win in the final chapter through sheer pigheadedness. There seems like an opportunity for pathos there, but it might be too cruel to the reader who's worked through so much. The final fight has several paths to victory depending on whom you take along, which is a neat touch. You don't have to be Ms. Super-Good.

I don't really have any huge criticisms. The introduction brushed me back a bit, since there's so much to establish. A lot of scrolling screens that set up the fantasy land history. And the end seems like an opportunity missed, as well. I never really understood what luck in the stats was for, as i only lost it once. A lot of actions in the final combat are repetitive and involve waiting for the right moment, and on getting your brother cured, you get a brief biography of your reign, and it's static, but below it are stats and attributes. This was largely noticeable because the middle breezed by so wonderfully, and I really enjoyed it. (Also: the music box puzzle others mentioned? I wasn't fully a fan, either, but I was glad for the walkthrough and explanation.)

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Graveyard Strolls, by Adina Brodkin

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Ghost Healer, no supernatural trinkets needed, January 17, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

I still don't particularly "get" Texture as a development system, as opposed to others: Ink, Twine, parser. However, it seems to produce a certain sort of effort I might otherwise ignore but for IFComp, and overall, I've enjoyed them. The GUI is just too fiddly for me, on a desktop or on a phone. But it does tamp down some of the special-effect excesses that can occur in Twine and ambiguities of the parser. You need to keep stuff tidy on one screen. It doesn't seem built for long works. GS felt like the most technically substantial of the IFComp texture entries, and it didn't feel too long.

My expectations certainly swerved through GS. Early on, you have a lot of player deaths, as you'd expect from a game named Graveyard Strolls. Whether you flee or not, you can get killed, unless you thread the needle. Most of the time, you'll figure what to do, but there are enough forks you will probably slip once later. Then, later, there are ghosts you have to face, which I assumed would be as lethal as the ones that struck from the blue to kill me. With a lack of undo feature, this was stressful indeed. Not just that my character would die, but I'd have to retrace my steps with a lot of mouse-tinkering!

So I don't know if this was fair, or if it was intentional, but it worked well in the end. It's possible I missed things in the introduction and what you were going to the graveyard to do. But suffice it to say chickening out is a bad idea.

After the death-trap gauntlet, you wind up meeting spirits who need help. They're disappointed. They may even believe bizarre things. Talking with them is not so tough, and perhaps just having two options, one that feels contrary to the spirit of investigating stuff, cuts across what I already mentioned with the quick deaths. It feels either too easy or too tough to make the right choice.

But that's just the mechanics. The stories are rather good, with ghosts unable to quite remember things, or even believing wrong things, and there's a nice pet, too, because why not?

Even without any potential player deaths near the end (I didn't have the heart to check) it was a surprisingly harrrowing experience, but nothing to leave me permanently freaked out. Certainly I needed time between finishing and writing a review to think of things. There's a feeling of helping people who most say can't be helped, and how much can we do for them? And is it worth it? And if there is an afterlife, can we change, and how much? It's been asked before, but there's always a new way. Most times, a living person brings back a talisman to put a spirit at rest. Here, there's a bit more dialogue. As a dedicated source-checker, my not seeing how much you could've done immediately is a positive suggestion of immersion.

The final ghost you help does feel like a good one to end on, too, even though the progression to them feels like it has some holes. I didn't mind that jump much. Perhaps adding one more ghost would work here. You dealt with stuff and helped others deal with things finally. That's a good feeling and an unexpected one given the deaths early on, and it had more suspense than I thought it would. So GS is a bit bumpy, especially early on, but I enjoyed the fantastical elements combined with just trying to connect.

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Inside, by Ira Vlasenko

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Spells make the magician: what you know vs. what you use, January 16, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

This review is currently based on what I saw from playing and how I peeked ahead at the source code, so it isn't really based on a full experience. This is more due to my own bad time management than any huge bugs on the writer's part.

In this Ink game, you play as an accused witch–or is it an advisor to an accused witch, or a friendly spirit, or a familiar? It wasn't clear to me what you were, and I think that fits in with the general tone Inside wants to achieve. But the action is fast, right away. You must flee. And you do, to an underground lair with many terrors. I particularly enjoyed the encounter with the giant, where I wound up stuffing it to death with random foods.

That was quality enough that I felt bad getting tripped up at the next part. There were four doors to get through, but for one, potions were to be mixed, and it took a while to find the ingredients and recipe books. Then I had a choice between grating and slicing and chopping. For whatever reason, my mind snapped a fuse. It felt a bit too fiddly, even though with Ink, you can scroll up and see what you needed. This was almost certainly due to my general procrastination and not wanting to get stuck. It's weird–give me a walkthrough and I'll eat it up, but the same information in-game that I have to scroll back for is too much for me. Or maybe it was just that I didn't really get to explore to find all the ingredients, as I might have in Lazy Wizard's Guide, and the mixing interface wasn't as smooth as Thick Table Tavern.

So I will have to give myself an incomplete on this, but I recognize there's enough quality and touches to make for an interesting story. I read through the source, and I enjoyed piecing together your final dash to freedom and what that meant for the village. What most intrigued me was that, based on your actions, the backstory filled in a bit, suggesting you (Spoiler - click to show)deserved your persecutions, or didn't. This alone is very clever and obviously gives a game replayability beyond the usual "let's see all the endings" or "there are consequences for your actions, you know." Different spells work in different ways. I'm frustrated when this happens, when something with clear quality trips me up of my own volition, first near the end of the IFComp deadline, then when I procrastinate migrating it to IFDB. Because the parts I played were well-paced and involving.

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Arborea, by richard develyn

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A magical time-traveling forest, with wrongs to be righted, January 16, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

In his forum new-author introduction, the author mentioned he was a recently retired software engineer. If so, Arborea's one heck of a going away gift to give yourself, and at the risk of sounding corny, it's a gift for us too. Even if it didn't work out, it would still be a reminder of all the things we want to do and how we shouldn't let everyday life get in the way if we can help it. But it's better than that. And it's interesting to see how some people are coming back to a hobby they've had for a while, or that they meant to, because of the old Infocom adventures of the 80s, and they're finding their own ways to give us something neat.

It's presented as a computer simulation of many different eras and continents, and I was worried it was going to have a wishy-washy/overbearing "appreciate biodiversity and love our trees and respect Mother Nature and all that sort of thing because this is the only planet we've got" message, but thankfully that's not the case. There's all sorts of jokes in here, from physical comedy to well-timed puns. Some are even objectively bad, but they provide relief. For instance, there's a (charge) card once you've tamed a rhinoceros: "How do you stop a rhino charging? Take away his card." This bombs if you're over eight, but an allusion to it in a game works nicely. And that's what I found with Arborea's organization. It could easily be a mishmosh that doesn't quite work, but overall, it does, and when you combine eight hubs together with interlocking puzzles, that's not hard. Oh yes. You have a few funny deaths too. They're lampshaded well and pretty obvious. Enough was there, I was slightly disappointed there was no AMUSING section at the end for what I missed! Nitpicks.

As the title might suggest, a forest is the centerpiece of the game. It's where you start, with I actually had some problem guessing the first verb that helps you leave, mainly because I didn't read the help carefully enough, and also I didn't consider the most obvious thing to do if you are in a forest. One other thing you need to do is look at a gourd you've been given. Later, it tracks how much you've completed, but to start, it has some information on the different kinds of trees out there, and your initial job is to find those trees in the distance, and each one leads to a new area. It has an introductory-quiz feel, making me wonder if there's be one those choice-based flipbooks "if the bark is smooth, turn to page 8. Shaggy, page 13." But that's all there is for pedagogy. The rest is imagination.

And you get to go all over the place: Elizabethan England, Missouri in the 19th century, Indonesia, the Amazon rain forest, medieval Scandinavia, and Africa. There are some direct historical figures (Sir Francis Drake) and some more general ones. Missouri features a particular class of people. How much you do in each area feels well-weighted, and the puzzles have strong variety. With your gourd as a guide (it changes appearance each time you visit all the locations of one hub,) it combines because-it-is-there with fixing injustices. They're pretty obvious ones, but all the same, it feels good. There's supernatural stuff, too, from the just-sort-of-mystic-babble to the "oops, badly reincarnated, sport!"

I really enjoyed how to eventually destroy the gourd and get to near the end of the simulation, though near the end I was a bit exhausted. This may be an unfortunate side effect of trying to blitz through all the IFComp entries. Overall, there's some good wacky humor in there, and it lasted longer than most games did, but the end felt like it over-did that whole angle. I can't offer better advice. There should have been a denouement. Some jokes clearly hit, but for whatever reason, the self-contained end part didn't flow as well as the bigger whole game itself. That's a minor concern.

I'm not surprised Arborea placed high. It checks all the boxes without feeling like it tried to for a high placing. I felt guilty pointing out small bugs I stumbled on to the author, but that'll happen in lively worlds people create without, you know, being paid or having a team to check off on bugs. The anachronisms and time-shifting and such are pushed into the realm of creativity without being warped too far beyond belief. And I think in IFComp 2022, the reviewers tried to emphasize longer games, and if it gets more people to look at Arborea, even with a walkthrough, that's a good thing. It offers a lot to learn in terms of game design, and I'm quite glad I didn't put off reviewing and playing until the end of IFComp. My impatience would definitely have made me miss several details I enjoyed.

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Campus Invaders, by Marco Vallarino

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Pleasant hijinks and light academia/alien invasion satire, January 16, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

Marco Vallarino is one of several IFComp authors whose works I always meant to look at more in-depth. And here "more in-depth," means, sadly, "at all." I mean we've been in IFComp together but somehow I missed the chance to look at his two Darkiss games. CI is motivation beyond "gee, both Darkisses placed well" to fix that. It's unashamedly old-school and not a profound game, but it doesn't have to be. You are just some AFGNCAAPy schlep working at the university, trying to get a computer simulation/program working to zap aliens who've attacked.

And there are laughs along the way. There are joke names, and they're not side-splitters, but they made me smile. More creatively, you're given a long, weird password early. "Suddenly you realize that if you can remember this password by heart, you can do anything in life." Oh, and your first puzzle is to help a professor out of the vending machine they stuffed themselves into, to avoid getting killed or, at least, getting killed first. You rescue them in the way one would expect, with a coin you find lying around. There's another fetch quest or two to warm things up, and then the actual thinking begins. There's nothing too deep. Once you meet a robot with a laser, if you look around, you can guess what item might help you not get killed, and how you can get that item. There's also an overhead projector that's too heavy to carry. I don't know how much they're used these days, but I appreciate that sort of thing for nostalgia's sake. I mean, lots of games have flashlights and such, but I haven't used an overhead projector since Akkoteaque, which is nice even if unfinished.

The final puzzle is also very pleasing. CI is not the first game to feature you having to screw in batteries, but the twist at the end to get the computers running is clever and sensible and I'm glad it didn't get too absurdist. There's a lot of funny stuff in here, and it pays off relatively quickly, with a bit of drama even though it's pretty clear the aliens can and should meet a bad end. Even a stupid death at the beginning is a clue. You also have to sort-of disguise yourself. This brought back memories of a tough Infocom puzzle, but fortunately there's a lot less calculation here.

For being a z5 game, CI contains an impressive amount of fun. A university setting is one that could easily bloat, but this doesn't, and it seems to hit all the tropes without overplayingthem. Perhaps the author specifically set themselves to creating a z5 game and nothing bigger. I for my part was pleased to fit my own effort into the Z8 format, which allows double the size/memory, and while it's neat to see Inform's new features, I enjoy seeing the sort of economy exercised by PunyInform authors or, well, this game. They can fit a lot in.

One of many fourth-wall jokes hints at Campus Invaders 2.0. I'm looking forward to that, after this experience. I suspect CI placed a bit low because people relate more to Vampires and Zombies and not due to quality issues. I don't much care for vampires or zombies, but the Darkiss games will be nice while I'm waiting for CI2.

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Under the Bridge, by Samantha Khan

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
So, how much sympathy do you think you deserve?, January 16, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

The description left me worried Under the Bridge might be an exercise in a monster finding different ways to maul people. Thankfully, I was wrong. You get to maul people if you want. You even have to, at the start. But there is real humanity in the decisions you make, with enough tension in your choices to make it feel like you're not just overturning rocks to see what all happens (Note: allowing undo was a VERY good choice in this work. The introduction that sets the mood is effective enough but takes nontrivial time.)

Yes, you're a deformed monster under the bridge. But you have excuses, even reasons, for being as you are. There's a new bridge, one which leaves your forest even more populated by humans. Being able to hide under it is scant relief. Humans pass back and forth, and in the first encounter at night, two of them meet on the bridge. One threatens another. You have a choice to kill one or both. Your moral sense is not fully developed beyond knowing your territory has been invaded, but you can smell fear regularly.

More humans pass in the day. A woman with her child and, if you are very aggressive, an army of humans. But there are also ways out. Two good endings may not feel totally satisfactory, as they leave the door open for people impinging on your territory later, but they're very different in how you wind up, what you fear, and whom you trust.

The sound effects and graphics (black with white lines) are effective, and there's even a bit of upside-down text signifying you looking into the river and thinking of things. This isn't the first work to use upside-down text, and it's more serious than Elizabeth Smyth's LIDO, written for EctoComp. I'm reminded how Twitter had upside-down text that was a fad for a while. Here perhaps the text is overused a bit, but it adds to the story overall.

UTB is in a tricky spot. There can only be so many choices, because the main character doesn't and can't think deeply. It doesn't recognize that humans may fear predators beyond it, too, and it's genuinely surprised at the alliance ending. There's some fear in the other good ending, too, as you find an entity you can't quite trust, and you're also surprised a bit by humans in the worst ending. UTB branches economically, which seems right, because too much would belie that you are, well, a simple beast. I think it had more emotional impact that Grue from a few IFComps back. I liked Grue, which sort of relied on the Zork canon, and one suspects a Grue doesn't really have the intelligence for parser-style commands. There your goal was to escape, and that was it. Here the main character here has more dimensions that go beyond "animals have feelings too," so UTB is great value for the time spent to reach all the endings. It's not intended to be cheery, of course, but it never dumps angst and violence and gore on you, and I appreciated the restraint along with the possibility of not-fully-happy endings.

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CHASE THE SUN, by Frankie Kavakich
Apocalypse in several flavors, January 16, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

Ah, the end of the world. I've had nightmares about it. About what I'd do at the end. A feeling of helplessness, a sudden hope there is afterlife. I can't tell if they're worse than the public humiliation nightmares, because with the public humiliation nightmares, you can cope, or even isolate certain incidents that almost could happen in real life, so you can stand up to certain types of people, or certain lines of attack. But the end of the world? Not so much. Nature doesn't care, whether it's the natural death of the sun or something horrible and man-made. Certainly the threat of nuclear war back in February 2022, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, brought back a lot of these worries and thoughts. I hadn't had them since the glorious days of Duck and Cover.

Here you're driving west in a truck that is close to empty, and you have to assume gas stations aren't open, or if they are, they're gouging prices. A truck can go 60 MPH. The sun? Well, you have to go 1000 MPH to keep up with it. So, yeah, here it's pretty obvious you're going to fail, just by the title alone, but the only question is: how?

There are several ways in CtS, and none of them are particularly appealing, but on the other hand, there's a lack of melodrama. I went unconscious in my truck, got lost in a forest, and wound up fleeing people who actually welcomed the rapture. The choices sprawl, for such a small work, but they don't feel totally random. A lot of early choice-based works had branches all over the place, often for humor (EctoComp Petite Mort is good at this, and Ruderbanger Doppleganger's Last Minute is an extreme example,) other times just to get something in before the comp deadline.

Each end seems to denote futility in different ways. They all worked for me. There's no melodrama, just an inability on the author's end to accept that the world's coming to an end, whether or not they saw the disaster in advance. I thought the strongest ending was with the people who said "oh come on think positive you have nothing to worry about if you've been good." This sort of "embrace the inevitability, it can't be that bad" is annoying even for far smaller things, such as a favorite restaurant or pub closing, or even trying to type in that last bit on a library computer when I had a bunch of writing notes and couldn't quite concentrate at home. (The time constraints actually helped me get a lot done.)

Perhaps CtS would not have been as effective if I'd played it earlier in the IFComp cycle. With a bunch of games to go, and not being sure if I could make it, it worked very well, but I think it would've done so anyway. We all have those deadlines, or we should. We've all seen things die and had people say "oh don't worry, there'll be something else. Enjoy the ride." And there will be something else, and we can enjoy the ride, but we really don't want to hear these people anyway. They're not helpful.

I think CtS did a very good job of projecting controlled emotions. It reminded me of times I'd gotten close to freaking out when I shouldn't be, which put me dangerously close to "why am I freaking out over something not worth freaking out over" territory. I was pretty sure I didn't need a stark reminder of mortality when I started, but once done, it seemed appropriate and good.

I spent time making sure I'd hit the main branches, because I wanted to draw out the CtS experience a bit more, but not too much. I knew I was sort of staving off the inevitable, and I felt slightly bummed it ended so soon, which is better than things ending too late. This is in contrast to the actual end of the world, most of us would probably want to drag it out, even if there was just woe and pain left, and there probably wouldn't be much time or energy reserved for making sure you've seen what you want to. After seeing what the author had to say, I guess I was, well, ready for the end of it all, and not in the "geez I hope this ends" sort of way.

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Blood Island, by Billy Krolick
Hate all the characters, like most everything else, January 16, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

A confession: I don't like slasher movies, and I don't like reality TV/unscripted drama. Whichever you call it. I find it cynical and exploitative and it can sucker us into wasting our emotions on people who don't deserve it. Though I have another small confession. I enjoyed the first season of The Apprentice, mainly because Carolyn and George actually gave helpful advice, before they were fired and replaced with the, um, star's children. So it did unravel! And there were two other series: one got canceled halfway through the first season, and the other dropped off quickly in the second.

Details on what I liked, hidden as a possible tangent and not really a spoiler: (Spoiler - click to show)The first was My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss, which took The Apprentice to extremes. The host, Mr. N. Paul Todd--note the anagram-–seemed impossibly sleazy by the innocent standards of 2005 or so, with the tasks such as selling "The Windy City Blows" mugs in Chicago that were stupid and nearly impossible. The firings were random. I missed the first few episodes, it was canceled before the end, and I was thrilled to find the missing videos a couple years later. It was beautiful satire, especially when Todd explained he trusted his supervisors so much because he didn't trust him at all. Then the actor playing him said "I don't know what I was saying, but whatever it was, I started to believe it." The second was a show called average Joe, where men of average attractiveness tried to buy for a woman's romantic attention. What I liked about the second was that the men involved decided to just have a good time, for the most part, and the guy who actually competed was a real jerk and got kicked off. Of course, they ran the formula into the ground, and it quickly became unwatchable, as the producers focused on what seemed to make it profitable and kept trying to turn the volume to 11. The only reason I watch these shows is because they were on the televisions where I worked out. But I was well aware of how addictive they could be.

So you can see that what I like generally subverts expectations or is different from what the average viewer likes. Also, ChoiceScript isn't my favorite platform, since I prefer to use a desktop–though I have definitely enjoyed such games–and from my experience, the statistics taken didn't really add much to the game. Maybe they blocked out some options at the end.

So on paper, I should not have liked BI. But I remembered the author from last year, and they had a very strong first entry called The Waiting Room. And it touches on why the shows I liked fell off--they got too self-aware, or aware of profit, among other things. And BI provides distance from the whole rubbernecking-at-an-accident views that sucker so many people into reality TV, along with reasons why it happens. And while the Big Reveal may not be as surprising as a movie it reminded me of (spoilers later,) it's still satisfying. But I can confidently say I hope to see the author back, but not with a BI sequel. Once is enough, and not in the "THAT'S ENOUGH, ALREADY" sense.

But how do we get to The Big Reveal? Well, you're a contestant on Passion in Paradise, the reality dating show that had a hiccup: a slasher with a Barbie mask ruined the (relative) peace of the dating and backstabbing that kept people's eyeballs glued to the show. Though, of course, a clip of it somehow racked up a crazy level of views. You've added to said number, and Chloe, the producer, assures you nothing will happen again. She asks some introductory questions about your personality, and then you have the obligatory introduce-yourself-to-the-audience interview. It's possible to try to subvert the whole show, but Chloe always seems to have a cheery response, and I enjoyed seeing how the character got boxed in by praise they didn't want until Chloe decided to get on with things. With what I know of reality TV, which is comparatively little, there is certainly a lot of the contestants being goaded into doing things, all the while seeming like they are free spirits and nobody can tell them what to do, and that's part of what makes them so exciting. So the lack of agency here seems very appropriate. Also, Chloe's "isn't this disgusting?" reminded me of teenage classmates who talked of certain, um, impure acts. And I realized how badly they were covering up their own questions or secret actions or desires, in the same way Chloe was hinting that you should be looking for something darker.

I had trouble telling a lot of the prospective dates apart at first. There are a lot of them! Maybe that's part of the point, that they all sort of run together and they're generically physically attractive and they aren't really going to offend anybody, and people can like them or hate them as need to be. It sort of underscored how awful I would feel being on one of those shows. But get a date I did, and I made small talk and so forth. And I felt a certain tension when the first scare came! No, I wasn't surprised Knife Barbie reappeared, and yes, the fear went beyond "oh no I don't want to have to reload and do this."

And fellow contestants started dropping. More than knives were employed–nothing like guns, that'd be too corny. Of course, confederates were suspected, and sometimes BI suggested who it might be, and sometimes it didn't. There's drama at a hospital and many other places that, well, help give a show variety. It seems no matter what you do, the producers like you, and I even got called back for a "where are they now" moment–properly compensated, of course, but I needed to pay my hospital bills some way or other.

As I replayed to see what would change if I behaved differently or, indeed, if the randomizer chose a new knife-wielder or confederate, it struck me. I was, to some degree, like the people who would watch such a show for ironic value and then get swept up in it, and then maybe swear that, oh, they're only watching it for the laughs, but they do get emotionally involved. No, really! But they Wouldn't want their friends to miss out on all the excitement, so they bring their friends over, and eventually they have a party. Perhaps it's a good thing that I didn't have a huge group of friends to call over to play this, and hopefully my checking the source after replaying showed that I wasn't emotionally connected with any of the characters. This isn't to rag on the author failing to give us relatable characters but rather to say, well, the focus is on making such a morally and aesthetically reprehensible show plausible. And BI did. I found a far different ending the second time I played through. And it struck me: Chloe had been chatty and encouraging and all the first time through, and so I thought that was a relatively good end. But I got a lot more praise, in quality and quantity, for behaving badly. It brought back memories of people who were telling me I was nice and all, and of people saying "that's too scary for you, right?" and I figured I had to say yes and they wanted me to say no, and they probably looked down on me for that.

As a skewering of bankrupt values in "unscripted dramas" BI works very well. Such skewering is not strictly needed, and it can be overdone, but if it's done well, it does have more to say than "reality TV is very cynical." It's about what you need to do to get and stay popular, and how encouragement from people who seem to be your friend, or who are letting you be their friend on a trial basis if you are exciting and acceptable enough to them, can really backfire. It's about being pulled into something and knowing you should escape, but you can't. Certainly there are ways to try to escape in BI, but you're both physically and emotionally manipulated into staying. The final moment of both the relatively normal and more exaggerated ending reminded me of Network, and I had a hard time pulling myself away. I was glad I got to see the wizard behind the curtain with the source code. And I think bi wound up appealing to me as someone who might have run screaming from the blurb had I not played it in IFComp. Perhaps fans of the genres will feel differently, because they understand more nuances, and what are revelations to me are it's-been-done fodder to them. Perhaps it overemphasizes things people already know, or should know. Sometimes the fourth wall revelations strained a bit. But in that case, I enjoyed what I saw.

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The Tin Mug, by Alice E. Wells, Sia See and Jkj Yuio

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A moment of silence for Young Me's favorite cup, bowl, pen and ball..., January 15, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

I've had people tell me I should drop acid, or that I'm missing something by not doing so. Oh, the things you'll think! Oh, the walls you'll taste! Alas, the potential downsides seem too great a risk. My stodgy, boring self settles for ... well, stuff like The Tin Mug, which makes me laugh and contemplate things well enough that acid seems that much more foolish a risk. Perhaps I am unforgivably g-rated, but yes, I'm too old to worry about much any more. TTM-type stuff also leaves me less worried about things afterwards and less sad about old toys or utensils that did their jobs. It's not a huge risk, or revolutionary, and it won't blow your world away. But my personality is, I'm very okay with thinking about this rather than, well ... why i am missing out by not having a sports car, or not having cable so I can watch the latest hot show (never mind that I have a huge backlog already!) It's comfortable without being a rut.

And that's more than good enough for me. The plot here is simple enough. You are a tin mug, and it's your birthday. You don't quite belong with the fancier china (the cook removes you to a lesser cupboard quickly,) and even some of the tin cookware looks down their noses at you. You're not really expecting something, but gosh, it might still be nice if you got recognition. This is, of course, a concern for many people, too, especially as they get older. And, well, there are whispers the tin mug is past its prime. Not that the tin mug is terribly mature! It causes trouble for another poor cup. But it, along with a spoon, will be part of family drama. Two kids come over. One's very nice, and the other ... isn't. Awkwardness is navigated. At the end we learn the significance of the tin mug, and the story is tied up neatly. Even the mug's early indiscretions are fixed. We learn that more than just the cookware is sentient. It's charming without being twee.

I replayed through immediately to see the other choices. There were few differences, but I found details I'd missed when plowing through. The other cookware has concerns, too, and even the furniture works together to lessen the impact of Kevin, the bratty boy. Nothing major changes, but I didn't need any sprawling choices, and the whole work might have felt a bit odd with them. You are, after all, only a cup. There's only so much you can do. But the authors have found enough for an enjoyable story.

I guess we've all worried if our favorite cup will break, or we'll feel bad our long-time favorite towel is too worn, or we realize that pen that served us so well for so long and wrote all those good ideas is almost out, so we leave it at an angle so plenty of ink is always near the tip. It's not something we can really do with bigger appliances. One doesn't exactly kiss a fridge or oven or give the thermostat an affectionate pat. But we all have our weird hang-ups and superstitions, some practical, some no longer practical.

After playing, and replaying to touch up this review, I was surprised about the things I remembered: the rubber ball that fell apart, the greyish tennis ball that still bounced nicely, the Big Ten cups from when the Big Ten only had ten teams (Iowa's Hawkeye had ISU emblazoned on the front!) which I found on eBay, which was sort of charming, because apparently this story was originally written before the Internet age. A few, I didn't, such as the McDonald's promotional cup that celebrated interleague MLB play. It lasted a few years before cracking. No sturdy tin mug, but enough memories all the same, even half-forgotten.

Perhaps the only downside is that I'm going to feel slightly guilty about the next piece of junk mail I throw out when I'm really tired, or the next piece of scratch paper I barely use, even if I don't stick it in the shredder. But more likely, I'll find yet another old pen I appreciated (too few survived until they ran out of ink,) or I'll remember what's in that drawer I haven't pulled open for a while, and I'll have a few stories of my own. Nothing as engaging as this, but they'll be mine, and they'll be satisfying enough.

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INK, by Sangita V Nuli

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
The opposite of blotting out grief, January 15, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

The author's two entries in IFComp are interesting bookends: in US Route 160, you're fleeing a dislikable fiance, and here, well, someone you like dies. I found US Route 160 to be the more evocative of the two. Perhaps it's my general dislike for Texture, even when using my finger on a phone. I seem to let the dialog box drop in just the wrong place, and it breaks immersion for me. So this may have colored things. More importantly, perhaps another reason INK didn't resonate as much with me was I never felt the lost of a fiancee, and my family's marriages aren't terribly happy. The closest I've got is losing longtime pets, and what happened to the protagonist reminded me of having my life dented for a while. But fortunately things snapped back. My experience was to have some cat beds lying around, so I could look at them a bit, or have a cupboard full of toys. I didn't work at the desk where one cat snuck behind one day and died for a while. So I spent time and emotion avoiding parts of my living area. In that respect, I was like the protagonist who saw ink in places where their fiancee had been. But I guess a cat only takes up so much of the bed. And also my cats were old. So I never had that sudden shock of loss.

And I may be stony about all of this. But I hope I appreciate the agent that spreads the ink: a letter from your fiancee, after she's died. It's not lost in a corner but found while walking around. It seems like it should be just the thing you need, an unexpected gift, something you should be very happy about. But it winds up driving you crazy. You can't even open it, until you do, and things get worse. Then people around you give you the standard advice, and there's always the overtone of "boy, you're going a bit crazier than you need, eh?" I see how this could parallel the anxiety of getting an email from a friend you've lost contact with, whether you still like them or not.

The image of ink spreading and making its own space is potentially powerful, but it seems IFComp has a few games about grief and loss, and I'm very worried that my opinion of them is based on whichever I play first, or what mood I'm in when I play. In this case, INK was one of the later entries I looked at. So it feels dismissive to say "yes yes I know already losing stuff sucks and I don't know how to get over that and you know I don't and I know you know I don't" and so forth" but I can't stop thinking it. Then it happens to me, and I'm on the other side, and of course people don't understand. I remember misplacing something. I realize I missed it and still do. I don't care that I managed to deal with it. But dealing sucked and sucked energy. And so I get all that (I think).

Still, games about general social isolation are more my jam. The frustration and deep thought feel more productive for me, and I recognize that bias, and while INK establishes grief makes it hard to be constructive, it hits a wall with me. It feels like it overplays its hand a bit by the end. I don't know what's missing. Perhaps the choices between giving in and not giving in feel too binary and abstract, given how the ink takes over. Or perhaps I (still) don't have the proper life experience to appreciate this, yet. But I do have a corner of my heart that fears being able to appreciate this a bit too fully, and maybe I'm deciding not to look at it, like the protagonist avoids looking at the letter, for a while.

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Feathery Christmas, by OK Feather

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Makes you wonder why Santa didn't use pigeons in the first place, January 14, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron 2020 Christmas Comp

Feathery Christmas replaces Santa's sleigh and reindeer with, well, pigeons. It's a cute, small story, and the puzzles are mostly abstract. Larry, the pigeon leader, needs you to feed his flock, and then you need to find a secret code in a church to release them to deliver a package. It's a bit tenuous, as are many logic puzzles (truthteller/liar and a general logic grid to decide which pigeons haven't been fed,) but it also has easy and hard mode, where the puzzles vary. The replayability was welcome, especially when you needed to find the shortest way through a wind tunnel with houses on easy mode, then the longest on hard mode. It's not super-robust, but it's more than competent, and the pictures are, well, legitimately artistic.

Having played on both easy and hard mode, I noted that besides the abstract puzzles, the item-trading you needed to do to get a ticket to the church was identical, as was acquiring bread. You also had a book that translated to and from Korean, and again this was cheery, but given that I don't know the Korean alphabet, I didn't get the full effect. There's also a puzzle of how many times to ring the church bell--again, reading the books you trade back and forth will show you this.

That said I really enjoyed the final puzzle where you guided a bird east through the screen. There are wind gusts that push you east to speed you up, until you bump into a house. The quickest solution isn't immediately apparent, and the slowest one seems almost counterintuitive. It's a fun, original bit of calculation that never feels like busy work, and there's no pressure either. You just keep trying again. It's one of those moments that shows potential for a great deal more, and I wound up thinking more about this puzzle than the rest of the game. And, well, it fit perfectly in with the theme of pigeons flying, while the logic puzzles for feeding bread didn't quite mesh. It was a neat conclusion. If the author worried this might challenge the player too much, well, I for one would disagree and would hope to see more of this from them, as opposed to the vanilla book-swapping and logic-chopping.

I'd have seen FC favorably even without it, though. In the end I hoped for considerably more, always a good sign, and so I was glad I could replay quickly on hard mode.

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SANTAPUNK 2076, by Gymcrash

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
What if Santa got twisted for corporate greed? Okay, even more twisted?, January 14, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron 2020 Christmas Comp

SANTAPUNK 2076 is a short, cute cyber-dystopian game with a few interesting puzzles. This seems like a contradiction, but it's handled well enough to make a nice short story. You are a deliveryperson for. There seem to be all sorts of references to things going wrong and persecution being a part of life, from "You are Number Five" (-The Prisoner) down to Amasoon Logistics, the Claus-Mishima Corporation and, of course, a gaudy job title: Executive Lead Fulfillment. It's a lofty way to say "you need to deliver a package," but they do keep getting loftier and loftier as the pay gets worse and worse. There are other dystopian touches, such as the McKingdy's fast food restaurant (Burger King and Wendy have been assimilated! However, I reserve hope that Arby's has held out.) I can't speak to the similarities to Cyberpunk 2077, but SANTAPUNK stood well on its own for me.

The graphics certainly reminded me of an upgrade over when I played Neuromancer, another dystopian game (it had message boards and email! Back around 1990!) on my old Apple II. And those felt so revolutionary, because they included yellow, and--well, these are better, and they're pretty much done by one person in not much time. So, very impressive! Hooray technology! Well, aside from the whole "accelerating dystopia" thing. And the puzzles are neat--hacking an interface and, in one case, discovering a really awful password. While this always feels slightly artificial, it's quite believable that people are still exasperated enough with password security that they write dumb ones, and the joke can work in many guises. It does here. You have to forge your identiy to enter an apartment. This opens up an even more worrying mystery beyond "oh no the computers have taken over, and worse, the people who crave power have taken over the computers, or vice versa."

Perhaps the whole message is a bit heavy, but I laughed for all that. The graphics helped soften the message. I wound up with a grade of A for my performance. I felt very proud of myself, despite the information I read that, in fact, the world was going further down the tubes. Well, until I considered the possibility that Amasoon Logistics may have given me the best grade for just shutting up and mindlessly what I was told and not considering the moral ramifications of my actions. (I was just plowing through.) This worried me. But the graphics and puzzles were cute! The game notes noted multiple paths through, and I'd found a quick one, and I wonder what others there might be, and what happens in the big picture if I somehow get a D.

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The Hidden King's Tomb, by Joshua Fratis

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Parsers, like ancient trapped tombs, are tricky..., January 13, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

Writing two entries for IFComp is hard, especially when they're different in scope or tone or setting. There's so much bouncing back and forth. And writing your first program in Inform is hard, too. Playing through HKT, there seemed to be potential well beyond "this author lucked onto a good subject and didn't make the most of it." So I may be poking at its weaknesses more than I might for entries that placed in its general area.

You see, the author had written two entries. And it sort of made sense. There's a lot to look at and enjoy in Counsel in the Cave (CitC,) which I think it's clearly the superior of the two, as did the judges--it deserved to finish in the upper half. In HKT the story is a bit sparser: a friend has pushed you into a pit which, serendipitously, is right by a mummified king's tomb. As you walk around, there's a Queen, too, and a sarcophagus. There are no supernatural NPCs chasing you, so you're a bit stuck. There's a nonstandard verb to guess. I was able to, though first I did so in the wrong place.

The tricky thing was, there was so much to take, I thought it'd be a puzzle where you performed a ritual, and it wasn't quite. I can see the author intending it then scaling things back and leaving a few red herrings. Because after I guessed the verb, I found the way up and out of the tomb, through secret passages and other methods. The story clicked, though I wish I'd learned more about how or why your friend double-crossed you. Unfortunately there are a lot of unimplemented and sparsely described items, and when I was allowed to take fourteen candles, I thought there'd be puzzles, maybe a scale puzzle or something. But they just stayed in my inventory, along with other things. There seemed to be many chances to make cursed artifacts affect you negatively, or to note you needed others, but I missed that.

However, the changing map when you figure out what to do adds nice atmosphere. It would probably have made quite a good entry on its own, honed, making everything else scenery. As it was, I stumbled successfully through HKT without a real feeling of accomplishment. I think writing HKT was a good risk to take, even if it didn't pan out, and I'd like to see the tomb and story fleshed out a bit more.

I really do recommend playing CitC to see what the author is fully capable of. I suspect if they go the parser route in 2023, they'll have something more substantial than HKT. Because as-is, the experiment didn't quite work. I'd have encouraged a post-comp release even before working through CitC and, in fact, with some blind-spots fixed, HKT would be well worth a replay to me. Unfortunately, HKT as submitted falls into some traps we all must, as growing Inform programmers, and it may have caused people to shy away from CitC once people noticed both were by the same author. So if I am being critical of HKT, I'd also like to boost CitC.

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Northpole, by John Blythe

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Two-stage game of an elf's redemption, January 12, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron 2020 Christmas Comp

Northpole's graphics helped carry me through the rough bits for a really enjoyable experience. It's not the only game in the Adventuron Christmas Jam to do that, but it's particularly smooth and homey with a lot of variety in backdrops and elves to see. all very smooth and homey, and as you play through more, the variety of locations and people (well, mostly elves) drawn is impressive. Both realistic and magical landmarks are drawn with love and care and attention. The plot is strong, too, as you're a disgraced elf accused of causing delays in the delivery process. You need evidence it wasn't you. It's interesting how Northpole claims its own middle ground between Save Bigfoot's Christmas and Santa's Trainee Elf. The high production values helped me blow off a few potentially frustrating verb-guessing roadblocks. I wound up playing in two sittings: first, I got five presents so I could enter the Elves' village I'd been banned from. Then, I got the final two. Each half of the adventure is a distinct experience.

The snowy wasteland you've been exiled to is not too huge--fifteen rooms or so. The room names are generic and even duplicate, but given the images, you'll have enough of a map in my head to be able to wander around. (Besides, I'd rather have the images, if I had to choose.) There are two places that indicate an area behind, both via text and graphics, each with the appropriate mystery. The Elven Pole in particular is neat. There's a snowman tucked away in off to the side as well. You can ASK it for hints, but since it's out of the way, you need to organize things first, which is a neater bumper than "ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT HINTS?" And while HINT gives some help, too, you get tripped up if there's nothing to do in a room. Northpole shows the verb-help menu, which scrolls. And it doesn't necessarily help with the verbs you need to guess. And all this has another thing drawing you on: the outside wasteland locations are well-drawn, but the village Bori the Border Elf guards you from, well, you can see how colorful it is at the entry to the village. The wasteland part is beautiful, but the village promises even more, so there's motivation to get there beyond "I want to solve this."

It delivers visually, and the plot picks up, too. Villagers you find new clues about who has disrupted things. The puzzling part is less smooth, but it has more story, with other elves to ask questions of and a neat reversion of the "kid standing on other kid under a coat to get into the movie" trope.

There are two more presents you must find in the elf village area, and I found some fiddling with verbs was necessary to break through. Eventually I found a command I thought I'd tried. There are a lot of cutting implements. AndI was able to see roughly the order I needed to do things in, and what I needed to do, but I had to scour through the village again.

That said, the mystery of a weird fireplace that teleports you if you use the right powders is a neat one--you won't even have to use the parser to mix the right ones when the time comes! And the final puzzle to snatch the final present away is suitably clever and closes a loop on a few plot points.

I thought highly enough of Northpole, despite some minor technical flaws, that I considered writing a map and guide of it for CASA quickly after winning it. I didn't want anyone who played it in the future to get stuck. But one was already there! I wasn't disappointed in the time I spent stuck, and I was glad someone else had played it two years after its release. It's a case where there are about ten verbs to guess, and you should do so 80% of the time. So the math dictates there'll be a hitch, but now you'll be able to enjoy nice story with many magical places to go and even a bit of helper-elf culture to explore without getting stuck. (I almost found myself craving sprouts.) I'd guess a lot of people would be glad to call it a day after getting into the village and seeing their way around, but I was very glad to see that last bit of magic when I came back to Northpole and figured a way to brute-force things.

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4 Edith + 2 Niki, by fishandbeer

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Un-4-2-itous, January 11, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

This one's really short by IFComp standards. I mean, it's shorter than The Lift, which I like to point out as something someone slapped together because IFComp seemed neat to enter at the time, and also to win the game you have to do something kind of hilariously skeevy. The author had other creative pursuits which, on Googling, seemed to go well, and they probably thought, what the heck. It happens. And with 4E, the concept had so much you could do with it, but there's no other way to say it: you bounce around and check out a few coworkers named Edit(h) and Niki and choose one to go on a date with. None work. Thankfully, it's got more than the most minimal on IFDB. I remember the author's name, but it'd be mean to share them. The game simply asked "Do you want to win this game?" Well, it kept the IFDB front page busy for a bit. Even when the author made points I agreed with, it made points so clunkily that I just groaned.

With 4E there's more, and the premise of sorting out similarly-named people is ripe for comedy. I was ready with a sheet of paper to evaluate pluses and minuses. I was about to start writing. Then I chose someone, just to see what happened. 4E ended. I undid and tried again. Same thing. I learned who Niklos Fenyo was, which is something.

The final observations are sparse, with a sentence or two describing your remaining life together, which may be a long relationship or not. It's arbitrarily chosen and can't be changed. So there is not a ton to see here, and given the game mentions it was for Twiny Jam, with some details added, I could have done with more. Well, better a bad date than a bad drawn-out relationship! It felt a bit more like getting free samples of the only thing left at the store, and it's nice, but you're not going to buy it as-is and you know why it was left last. My guess is that the author misjudged the scope of IFComp, and if they'd known it was for potentially longer works, they could and would have done more.

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Day of the Sleigh, by Dee Cooke

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Stuck with Santa and your little sister, January 10, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron 2020 Christmas Comp

Day of the Sleigh hits several holiday notes for nostalgia and hits them well: it's the 80s, and you are a teen with a babysitting job. Today, you're taking Deirdre, who is more excited about Christmas than you, shopping. (I'm not sure where her parents are. All the same, this potential plot hole wasn't worth scrapping the game over. I actually played in to sessions and assumed you, Elidih, were her older sister.) Deirdre's so excited, she runs off in a department store when the lights go out and gets lost and trapped.

Thus begins the fun. Deirdre's not hard to find, but you can't get to her right away. While it's not a huge emotional moment, I still don't want to spoil it. You can't blame a young kid for getting lost the way she did, and you can't blame Elidih for being exasperated, even when you get Deirdre to cooperate for something important. Elidih understands certain things aren't fun for teens but were for seven-year-olds, and that's good enough.

DotS is not a very big game at four rooms, and there isn't a ton to do, but it's more fulfilling than many bigger games. Your first task is to find a key that opens a door to the south. Tutorial mode works very well here. It establishes you'll need to look under or behind or in a few items, which would get exhausting in too many rooms, but they set the mood well for the treasure hunt. It also establishes its size early. There are stairs up, but you can't go without Dierdre.

This was comforting when I had trouble finding what Santa wanted. What he wants is randomized across games, and a few quick replays suggest there are four treasures, one in each room. So you may get lucky and find what you want right away. Then, once the sleigh is full, you need to get it running and open an exit. This requires a few steps that include contacting the shop workers without, you know, letting them know Santa is nearby. They also have an item you need, but they're not going to give it to some teen.

Despite having only four locations, DotS's room graphics are very colorful, and when you need to move scenery around, the graphics change, though Deirdre keeps her teddy bear and Fischer-Price radio even after escaping. So it feels very full. The variations on LOOK worked for me. They aren't the only puzzle, as there are some guess-the-verbs that also feel eminently fair. A couple need prepositions. And there's funny stuff to try, like giving Deirdre sweets. (She also seems to blame you for the whole situation, and seven-year-olds can get away with that! Given her name's similarity to the author, I wonder if this is a slight mea culpa to a babysitter they liked but they knew they got on their nerves a bit, because being that young, you can't help it. I've been there.)

In the end, Deirdre gets rescued, and I don't want to spoil precisely what happens, though I was glad I saved near the end. It's not earth-shattering, as high drama would ruin the humorous tone, though I do recommend restarting, as there are a few callbacks to the beginning text. I may have missed a few achievements, and that would make DotS well worth replaying to check on, but right now I, in the Deirdre school of thought, am running and grabbing all the Adventuron games in this jam that I can, because I can.

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The Solstice Sovereigns of the North, by Natrium729

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
"But what if the days DON'T get longer this winter?", January 9, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron 2020 Christmas Comp

SSoN's title does sound a bit ponderous, but fortunately, that doesn't carry over to the game, which has a great premise. The Summer Solstice Sovereign has refused to wake up the Winter Solstice Sovereign of the North, and until he wakes, the days will be very short and, I assume, cold. This comes to you in a dream. There's a ritual to perform. There's even a romantic interest. It all fits together quite nicely at the end.

SSoN isn't a huge game, with seven locations, and one is locked at the beginning. That's where an archaeologist lives, and you sort of have a crush on her. She helps you later on. But in the meantime, you need to find a way to cross the lake to get to the ritual site, and you're worried people may not believe you. Once you do, and you solve another puzzle, a neat cipher is revealed. Some suspension of disbelief is maybe required, here. You have about ten items in the cipher, which makes for a puzzle translating the ancient text that tells you what to do. And yet the puzzle was satisfying once I put this aside. The ritual isn't complicated or disturbing at all--you just need to find two items and use one semi-standard verb.

So SSoN feels like standard puzzle fare in some ways. And the puzzles do feel a bit puzzle-ish. One item I thought I had rendered useless turned out to be useful, but the in-game hints (I used them a few times--they work well) showed adventure game logic applied, sort of. The TLDR is, every location has a use. And there's one irregular verb that's semi-obvious for another item. There are two items that fuse together, as well, and while the actual combination was a slight stretch, it fit in well with the story. The location pictures similarly don't have a ton of detail--they remind me of Apple low-resolution graphics--but they adjust nicely when you move stuff around or even find or take an item. I don't know how difficult it is to adjust graphics across game states in Adventuron once, but having it work across the game is a nice progress gauge.

In the end, you get the girl and help the Winter Sovereign. I noted that English was the writer's second language, and this showed in obscure ways. It's a case where the translation is logically correct but, well, safe. It doesn't try any tricks, so sometimes the writing seems a bit pedestrian. I'm left feeling this would probably be a sharper, more colored-out story in the writer's native language. Parts feel on-the-nose. But the big idea is original and well-executed and very satisfying. So SSoN shines as not being like the usual "find and give gifts" which I've also enjoyed very much in the Adventuron 2020 Jam. Instead, it reverses something that we probably all wondered about as kids. What if the days don't get longer this year? We understand the physics, as adults, but SSoN reminded me of those fears and more. It also leaves open another angle, where maybe people try to summon bad magic to keep days extra-long, and you need to prevent that. I wound up thinking about that a lot after SSoN. I'd definitely play a game like that from the author.

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Deck the Halls, Gieves, by VerdantTome

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A welcome lost episode of Jeeves and Wooster, January 8, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron 2020 Christmas Comp

Wodehouse is one of those authors it seems easy to make a tribute to. The main problem seems to be avoiding too-well-trodden paths or, perhaps, a plot of his you just haven't read yet. And stories with Bertie Wooster and Jeeves seem particularly easy, because we know the formula. Bertie gets in trouble, sees a silly way out, and seems to make things work, until things turn out okay, because Jeeves planned things that way.

I knew this formula well, but the end was a nice surprise. I was distracted by the things I needed to do. And if part of the distraction was fighting the parser, well, I guess being slightly muddled helps put us in Bertie's shoes. Okay, your name's actually Bartie Worster (your middle name isn't Wilberforce, either,) and your butler is Gieves, probably for intellectual property reasons.

But DtHG does so much more than just say "Hey! You like Wodehouse? Here's something Wodehouse-y." Anything could be a bit too verbose, enough to bring back memories of Bertie, and we'd give it a cheerful wave and thumbs-up. Fortunately, the strong introduction made it clear the author knew their stuff, or knew it well enough I didn't mind being fooled.

The airy verbosity extends to useful error commands. Not that you have to have it. You can get rid of some '20s slang with an option, which helps limit one potential source of overkill (people's tastes will differ.) I admit at first the error messages threw me for a loop. But they really couldn't be the generic ones and keep the tone of the story! I think this is the first Adventuron game I've played with really custom error messages.

And there's a risk they may be too cute--I've had games I really liked where parser error messages backfired due to context. But here, Bertie has several random ones that loop. And my favorite staple, "you can't go that way" replacements are delightfully chatty. With each push-back I thought, hey, this is sort of neat, but then I realized there was a huge impressive body of work. Also, the help felt in tune with the 1920s and what Bertie would say. Outside of, well, the direct HELP that just states the main verbs. Bertie would probably be flummoxed by concepts such as a parser, after all!

The plot? DtHG begins in a town square, where you, Bertie, need to make change for a bell-ringer collecting for charity. You are not dropping a whole crown into their bucket! You actually have to make change twice. The game then twists to an estate where you, as a guest, are locked in your room and need to MacGyver your way out--the item descriptions make it pretty clear some of what must be used, and there's not too much.

For the third part, you need to rig things in the house so that Julia, the object of your affections, will step under the mistletoe and let you kiss her. You need to distract an overbearing aunt (a Wodehouse staple) and disable a door. Once it works, but doesn't, your final task seems trivial indeed.

The game is not very big (four rooms, one room, ten room in the three parts of the game,) but all the same there are enough places to visit, and the descriptions are funny. I got hung up trying to bring something messy in the house by tinkering with scenery I hadn't used yet and avoiding a room that had helped me solve a puzzle.

Jeeves is conspicuously absent from all this. But he plays a part.

DtHG, though, has some frustrating moments. The hints are well-done. You can HINT NEXT or HINT RECAP as needed, and Bertie vaguely discusses what he did in the big picture without spoiling things. There are also some guess-the-verb problems. HELP mentions this, and I agree that explicitly mentioning the verbs you need would spoil things, but the alternative is awkward, too! So maybe if there is a way for Adventuron to detect "Okay, you tried for the 10th time to do something with <ITEM>, I'll help you out" that would be useful. Or maybe things could be spoiled if you keep failing a certain way X times. That sort of balancing act's tricky.

I'm quite glad I played DtHG, all things considered. I imagine there's been a Wodehouse game tried elsewhere, and of course the Monkey Island games feel Wodehousian in their own way. And there are games that like to feel Wodehousian, with the 1920s setting and meandering stories I find more fun to read than actually sit and listen to. But based on what I've read, this feels the most closely connected to "Plum"'s works, and it pulls things off well.

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Save Bigfoot's Christmas!, by Quizlock

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Detective work, North Pole style, January 7, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron 2020 Christmas Comp

The enjoyment I got from Save Bigfoot's Christmas was well worth the struggles I had with the parser. This seems to be more a case of the author still learning Adventuron. It's a tidy, balanced game, in the big picture. You're an elf assigned with verifying who has been naughty and nice. Bigfoot is your subject. He believes he has been nice, but Santa has received information otherwise. That information is out of context, and your job is to find out why.

The crimes are not especially terrible: Bigfoot's hair is near a littered soda can in a national park, BIGFOOT has been sprayed on the side of a house in Hoboken, New Jersey, and Mrs. Maple's children have fingered Bigfoot as the thief of one of her pies. The graphics? Well, it's probably old hat to compare an Adventuron game to Sierra AGI graphics, but this feels particularly close to the good bits without rehashing any old Sierra puzzles, with graphics changing as you make progress, so that is very neat.

These locations are, unsurprisingly, spread out, and you need to go through a teleporter to get to them. In each one, your main goal is to (Spoiler - click to show)get rid of an NPC so you can rummage around the environs to find the needed evidence. The puzzles have a good balance of absurdism. In one case, there's a garage making a lot of noise, and you find a garage door opener. But of course the battery comes from another of the areas! So the puzzles have balance this way. You have to go in and out of the teleporter a few times.

Accomplishing each main task is pretty varied. Sometimes you must do something off-stage, and one (the campground) is pretty complex. There are a couple spare items I didn't figure the purpose of (the toy robot,) but the descriptions and basic verbs managed to clue me into what to do or try.

Brian Rushton's review mentions some of the exact verbs you need. This game pointed to a high-level weakness of Adventuron and maybe parsers in general: for Mrs. Maple's pie, I had an item to use and saw what to use it on, but the verb was tricky. Perhaps having a hint-cue if I typed both items would help, so the player doesn't flail too much. It was more notable than usual, since for an AAA battery, you couldn't type AAA or battery but had to type both. So hopefully this warning lets you know where not to get stuck.

Having that aha moment to get rid of the campers was the high point for me--after that, I had a bunch of wobbles, but the game clued me nicely to make progress inevitable but still challenging. Combined with a small puzzle-maze the game only made you go through once (I'm glad this user-friendliness seems to be more common!) it was clear the author was committed to the player having fun and was willing to offer ways to streamline the pedantic bits. There are still a few that could be sanded. For instance, you need to enter the transporter out and the portal back a lot, so ENTER TRANSPORTER and ENTER PORTAL could, after a try or two, be replaced by IN. Disambiguation for similar items could be honed. But there's nothing to really make you bash your head. SBC, despite being slightly raw, is genuinely uplifting and clever, so the bumps when the parser fights you a bit are quickly forgotten.

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Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee's, by Geoffrey Golden

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Terrible beer, terrible lives, great profit potential, January 6, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

Does anyone really like Applebee's? It's a pretty easy target. Maybe it deserves to be. Nobody likes working there. The food isn't great. But it seems convenient enough and not as unhealthy as McDonald's. You could do better. But you could do worse. You could say Applebee's is as easy a target as airline food was. It seems like a good target for someone like the author, who's so consistent about putting out an adventure gaming newsletter, and for light-hearted humor, it does well. It also goes beyond "Applebee's, amirite?" The main thing it hits is advertising. I mean, nobody really likes advertising. Many advertisers probably don't enjoy their jobs or the ethical implications. But over the years I've found ways to be able to zone it out, and I feel that's an achievement. Probably the trickiest was blocking the ads for stuff I didn't need between songs I didn't like at the athletic club. It's the sort of thing they don't teach you in school. But of course, advertisers are always looking for another way to horn in on your life, preferably without you feeling violated enough to push back.

One they haven't gotten around to in the real world is the protagonist's main power, which is being able to see in people's minds and also plant a thought there occasionally. So, yeah, you're getting quickly into "creepily overstepping boundaries" territory. And here I originally assumed the game would be about parlor tricks where the crowd paid money if you were particularly clever! (Of course, if some people just wanted to sit and eat and didn't know you'd be there, that's invasive in its own way.) There's a certain violation of childhood dreams for me, too--mind reading seemed like something really cool, but of course powermongers will ruin it. It's treated as an asset by corporate management, and not just an asset. One you'd better use to their advantage and maximize, or the lack of initiative goes on your performance review. But -- but! The ad agency you work for has ethics. Well, sort of. You'd better not mind-read more than once, or they'd be in legal trouble, and you can't do that to a place with such an innovative business model that helps you make the most of your abilities!

This is of course bad on many levels: one, that your psychic ability is for more ambitious and "big-thinking" people than you to enjoy, and two, that the legal branch of the whole corporate empire has considered all the angles here to provide loopholes if things go wrong, and they've probably cross-communicated with the number-crunchers, and even the lawyers who would sue you for violating other people's space are probably plenty sleazy. And so forth.

This is the scary bit. Fortunately there are funny bits. First, you work for Schtupmeister beer. The world can never have too many parody beer brands--these certainly do more for me than actual alcohol. The four people whose minds you want to invade are, well, imperfect in their own way. There is a cryptocurrency trader. This was written three months before Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX went belly-up, and now that happened, I'm actually sort of disappointed more wasn't written earlier about Cryptocurrency, and, well, it's a bit too easy of a target now. Cryptocurrency, like advertising, drains resources in ways most people aren't aware, and of course, there are some smug, slick types pushing it. But dang if the story doesn't roll out another side quickly!

There's also a somewhat lonely old man, and a waitress upset with her lot in life (I couldn't help but think Schtupmeister would both fire someone for drinking on the job and for, well, not getting enough people like her to start drinking on the job, or right after their job) and a kid who turns out to be exactly the wrong sort of special. Let's just say selling alcohol to minors isn't the worst thing going on here.

You have a small number of turns to try to get each to try your special brand of syrupy beer before Applebee's closes. Do so at the wrong time, and they ignore the instincts you planted in their brain. And this right time isn't obvious for all targets until you've played through UYPPA several times and read everyone's mind. Since it's not too long of a game, this is no burden, and I'm disturbed how nosy I got and how fast.

Once Applebee's is closed for business (my not just saying "closes" may be a minor spoiler) you can catch up with your targets to see if, indeed, your psychic invasions got them to buy Schtupmeister. The indications of whether they drank your specific brand of beer are amusing. For instance, one person has Schtupmeister beer spilled on their shirt instead of what they were drinking, and this pleases you greatly. In all cases, the fallout from people drinking Schtupmeister far outweighs any profits you redirect towards Schtupmeister.

Though you the player already have a pretty good idea, the performance review at the end hammers things home, both how well you did and how awful the Schtupmeister corporate culture must be. You get a combination of rah-rah and condescension from your sales manager no matter how many people you got hooked on Schtupmeister. UYPPA combines a lot of this sort of small horror into a big one.

Criticisms would be that UYPPA hits some low-hanging fruit, though it knows not to beat said fruit into a pulp. It's low-key terrifying, too, and I'm not surprised that an author who has a newsletter of short games understands balance. UYPPA reminded me of all the times I'd been accosted by salesmen, and how hard it was to turn them down, and the effort it took to be polite, because I knew it was their job, even though I knew part of their job was leveraging guilt and hesitation. These four decidedly imperfect souls of targets? Well, for the most part, I sympathize with them. The kid, no. His mother, yes. So this was definitely a successful entry, to me.

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A Christmas Quest, by Richard Pettigrew

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Elf needs transport, does chores, January 5, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron 2020 Christmas Comp

"Elf helping Santa" seems like a good idea for a Christmas theme in text adventures. Being Santa would require the sort of big-picture administrative commands or tasks we may be putting off with our latest game. And between A Christmas Quest and Santa's Trainee Elf, the results are intriguing. There's probably a limit to stories that keep things fresh, but these have enough differences.

The big one is this: STE is full of NPCs, but you have been left behind after an elves' party, and you have one more package to help deliver. There are some optional cleaning tasks and a small bit of gross-out humor (avoidable, I'm pretty sure, and not VERY gross) but the heart of the story is very neat indeed. The present is not too bad to find. The transport is trickier! Christmas games are best when they riff on something you thought was completely played-out, and ACQ definitely does so with a heart-warming way of finding transport.

The main puzzle is actually cooking something up, which sounds potentially really tedious, except once you know what to cook, the why is really persuasive. There is, in fact, a lot of fiddling, but with the imaginary ingredient involved, why you're doing it feels as real-lifey as an imaginary trip to the North Pole can.

The graphics are also neat--they go heavy on the green and red in many right ways, and I enjoyed wandering around once more before calling it a day. On winning, the game also suggests some actions that are the sort of thing a young elf would enjoy. I get the feeling more were implemented, but they might've been hidden.

There are some fiddly bits, such as needing to TAKE something to READ it. But the in-game hints do the job, along with David Welbourn's walkthrough in case I tripped up. So I was able to forgive any parser hacking, or perhaps the latest version fixed some things post-comp. And maybe ACQ could have benefited from keeping score or having a brief list. But then again, if you forgive any game, a holiday game has to be at the top of the list. And it feels like something I could come back to next Christmas and enjoy working through now that I get it in the big picture.

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The Adventures of the President of the United States, by Mikko Vuorinen

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Nice big idea, impeachable details, January 4, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

The idea behind the game is wonderful--the President escapes from his boring job in the White House and visits various countries. Only the big ones, plus Finland and Sweden, get a room. The puzzles are apolitical and silly, and they are generally funny once you figure them out. APUS also gives many funny default responses and "You can't go that way" replacements.

Unfortunately, it's not big enough ("South America's not interesting,") and it neve builds on the gags. The few puzzles that veer from recognizing gently amusing stereotypes are poorly cued. While there's no guess-the-verb, there's plenty of trivial commands semi-logically changing the environment, or the effect of other trivial commands.

There's such a contrast between what you do to leave the White House (nothing unclean, but imagining ANY recent President doing this makes me giggle) and explaining that the White House is pretty boring, and you're bored, except for some generic details, that the game feels grossly unpolished.

This is too bad, because I don't think an American could make a game like this, with such a neat title, and stay apolitical. And yet, the author couldn't be expected to know that a West Wing would make the opening puzzle a lot better.

So, more countries and better descriptions--the potential's there, as I enjoyed many quips and default command responses--would've made this game memorable for more than the title and opportunities missed. Not that I regret playing it. I enjoyed filling in the details I wished the game had, but others may just get exasperated.

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Jimmy's Christmas Foul, by Kieron Scott

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Hope the coal next year's worth it, kid!, January 4, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron 2020 Christmas Comp

Jimmy's Christmas Foul brings some self-awareness to a simple goal: get Santa to give you more presents than you deserve. Kids would all kind of like to. Some do it with a flowery letter. Some do it by being extra nice in December. And Jimmy, well ... you, as Jimmy, set a trap for Santa.

It's a relatively simple game--it admits as much, that it was created in a few hours, but there's still enough to do. It feels like there are too many rooms and not enough items at first, but the puzzle is where to lay the trap, and what to lay it with. There's a small puzzle with needing to climb something as well, and if you mess up setting the trap, you can actually lose.

The trap is not very complex, and the parser is very stripped-down (you have TAKE and DROP as the main commands,) there are hints, and you're even clued when you have things right with helpful colored text. Still there may be a bit of stumbling around--Jimmy knows better than to go in his parents' room, but there are a few locations that seem redundant. They aren't, totally, as part of the game's puzzle is figuring where to put the trap.

Physically, the puzzle is a bit odd, as (Spoiler - click to show)kids who believe in Santa or can't reach a medicine cabinet shouldn't be big enough to pick up trees and the item you use to tie up Santa is a bit flimsy. Plus, he doesn't try to escape, though your trap thankfully isn't very paralyzing.

In other words, there's a bit of absurdism in service of a short game where the author just wanted to have fun and share something. And they did! The graphics are also pretty neat. I'm also assuming that one of the items you discover was lost over the course of last year, and your parents didn't let you go somewhere. The item's out in the open, but it reminded me of (re-)discoveries I was happy to make when I was younger.

So JCF isn't something to overthink--especially since the hints show once and print I CAN'T. Perhaps it follows that kid-logic where you think your trap or your imaginary world is more complex than it is and you rightfully ignore any self-contradictions. The trap isn't, well, evil either, and for a few moments you can be that plotty, bratty kid I hope you never were for the holidays.

With the prize the author won from this comp, they seem to have gone on to create some interesting stuff, or at least the titles and cover art look intriguing. It's neat to see this--while Jimmy seems like the sort of kid who probably got bored with whatever toy he extorted from Santa, it's good to know the author has lived their life a bit differently.

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The Archivist and the Revolution, by Autumn Chen

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
finding meaning and relief in future dystopia + COVID + doomscrolling, January 4, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

Some self-indulgence, first: last year, while I was playing A Paradox Between Worlds (the author's 2021 entry,) it just so happened that it tied in very nicely with what I was doing at the moment. I was paying attention to an Internet community that was much more stable than what was described in PBW. It was run by adults, 4 adults, and in a way, about adults, but it was about adults younger than all of us. There was no focal point of the whole community. There were American college football teams, and golly there were a lot of them. Under the SBNation umbrella, people pretty much stay in line with basic decency, and if the founder wound up being a jerk, we could move on. Yet still I found a ton of parallels and a ton to be grateful for. Purdue was playing at Nebraska in American football and won a game fans from both sides, at http://offtackleempire.com, verified was very dumb. So, being a fan with superstitions, I decided to look through AatR while Purdue played Nebraska. The game was even more exciting than last year's, but of course we all thought it was very dumb. Both teams forgot to play defense, but fortunately, Nebraska forgot a bit more. And I forgot to, well, tune into this. I was still wrestling with AatR. Whether it's better than PBW, I can't say. It brought up entirely different issues, and I felt a lot less immediate personal involvement. So I'd definitely welcome a third entry that swerves in yet another direction, because I now have an established silly superstition.

This all may be a long and tedious joke, but the TLDR is that though I'm clearly not the intended audience for the author's works, I get a lot out of them. And seriously, it's this sort of thing that distracts me from watching football games I don't want to waste time with. I may not be Mr. Busy, but I value stuff that makes me look for better ways to use my time, or think big ideas, or whatever. And the author's IFComp entries are two-for-two in that department. I wound up falling asleep soon after playing, and when I woke up, I didn't check the late-night football scores. I poked at the alternate paths through.

So what makes AatR good? For starters, combines a few things that could be (and have been) beaten into the ground if done wrong: a job that pays and uses your skills a lot less than it should, money problems, relationship problems, and oh yes, being ostracized for being different. It'd be painful if an author focused too much on any one of these and of course it could get unwieldy if they're not mixed together right. The money angle seems intended to be frustrating. You're too tired to do your job (within the first five minutes, a polite email assures you you've just been reallocated, not demoted,) due to chronic fatigue syndrome and, well, other stuff. So you can never make as much money as you want, and a bit of quick mental math after my day's first pay showed me the pay was inadequate. But this is more than an argument for living wage. You find out you're an undesirable person (AatR discusses being trans and what it means or can mean–even going out for food is a bit dramatic) and perhaps your company is trying to push you out. The rent jumps exponentially, along with the late fees and so forth. And through it all, the archives you search through (your job) have a bunch of things you want to read and a bunch you're paid to file. I've read a lot of treatments of mean employers all "YOU COULD DO THE WORK IF YOU'D JUST BE NORMAL," and I've had times I was unable to work after "normal" conversations that excited everyone else and drained me, but this provided a new angle without the "hey, others have it worse than you, feel for them before moving on."

Because your job is not hard, at least technically. Emotionally? Perhaps--knowing you can and should do better, and sometimes you can't even do your job, must take a toll. To prevent the plot going too slowly, AatR may make it trivial on purpose, perhaps, once you get what to do. The file names tip off how to sort them, if you're paying attention, though it's not obvious at first glance. But given who you are, well, it feels almost like a lie to settle into something normal, or if you do settle into such a routine, you might let something else slip, and then society's out for you. This is captured in CityNet's messages about horrible "righteous" punishments for "men who impersonate women." Forgive the quotes. The news is obviously slanted and meant to attract the "what the hell is wrong with the victims?" responses found on in-game message boards. You admit it's exhausting to read CityNet, but you also can't avoid it. (Plus ca change, eh?) There's that plague going on, too, and wearing a mask, normally a common-sense pro-health thing, is seen as maybe disguising yourself further.

And of course the additional fees that crop up just for existing make it pretty clear you're not going to make it. Fortunately, you have old friends, exes in fact, you can lean on. Though it's hard. These choices are frequently blocked out, to show you're not up for it yet, or the fear of asking an ex is still stronger than the fear of eviction. Certainly I've faced this in much less dire circumstances–maybe it's just having the fear of an IFComp bug slip through versus the fear of "geez, how didn't you see how to code this?" on the message board, and if these fears are neither fully rational nor critical to my well-being, they're there.

I missed a lot the first time through, and I know it. In some ways there seems no path for me to really sympathize with the main character. Works where exes still care about each other are tough for me, given the sort of marriages in my family. (People stayed together and sniped.) But I appreciate a believable scenario where, yes, this is the case, and no matter how horrible the government is, people are willing to take risks for people they still care about, if not as intensely as usual. And that's uplifting, as is ending one, which I don't want to spoil because I may not fully have a handle on it. It's just that there's a weird feeling certain sorted messages are for you, and it's even weirder when you realize how justified that feeling is and reach that certain ending.

I spent a lot of time trying to poke through the different messages after downloading the source. I felt too mentally exhausted to play through again, but I wanted to find out more about the archivist's world, just as they wanted to find out about, well, mine. I remembered the times I wanted to go out and didn't, and the times I felt forced to go out but didn't want to, and the times I went out late just to avoid people to talk to. I think I'm missing the main point, and I'll need to read other reviews. But I got a lot out of it. Looking at the endings, I realized how tough it would be to actually play through the ones where you accept the friendship and help of someone you broke up with. It's something that would be effective in a dystopia or a normal world.

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The Grown-Up Detective Agency, by Brendan Patrick Hennessy

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Are you there, future me? It's me, former you!, January 4, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

I'll start by discussing a comment I saw on a forum about Matthews and Linehan and how I don't want to be that sort of person. M&L were the folks who created Father Ted, a universal character we probably wouldn't like in person but who showed our faults so well and let us laugh at them. The commenter said "Well, M&L never got close to that afterwards." Someone pointed out that The IT Crowd was very, very, good indeed, and the commenter said "Well, fair enough, but it's still not quite Father Ted."

Whether or not FT is better than IT Crowd, or however BPH's (I hope that's not too familiar. I know I hate, for instance, being abbreviated to Schultz. But I find Hennessy as misspellable as most people find Schultz, as my brain WILL insert that third E) works stack up to M&L, I want to relate this story: Small Child in Woods felt dang-near perfect to me. It had universal appeal and weird humor and made many people laugh. Someone had to do it, and I'm glad they did it well. Cow Farming Activities on the Former West, the second part of You Will Select a Decision, was almost as good. And the rest of the author's stuff? Well, it doesn't hit the sweet spot of SCiW for me, and he shouldn't try to, and when I make time for his stuff, it's always worth it. But I wouldn't want him to deliberately try for another flashy thunderbolt like SCiW. He owes me nothing.

Also, I'm hacked off he didn't publish the "promised" sequel It Is Good To Be Skateboarding Champion of the World. I had an idea that was just a bit of verbal gymnastics to make the reader laugh, and it still does, but each work of his reminds me I would love to read that apocryphal book some day. Curse the author for following their own vision, said the guy who knows his own stuff is probably more niche-y!

All this was no excuse for whiffing on Birdland, Known Unknowns, and BOAT PROM. And GUDA is one of many IFComp entries already that make me say, hey, I need to check stuff from this author's past, too. It may be the only one with a link in the introduction giving a brief overview, which I appreciated. But it was also sort of shocking to think, wait, did he really write Bell Park: Youth Detective that long ago? Wow.

Yes, it was nine years ago, and Bell is nine years older. She's a private detective now. I didn't recognize Cassidy, who's come to Bell with a missing persons report. More specifically, her fiance has gone missing. Checking back at BPYD, she doesn't get a ton of billing there. Drifting away from best friends is like that, I suppose, and with GUDA, it's pretty inevitable they would've broken up, as they show themselves to be very different people. Eventually you grow, and you realize how you were sorted into social groups at 12 was just a good guess, or it was the least awful of the available options, and you get to see what (hopefully) works even better.

All this navel-gazing aside, what sticks out about the start is: there is banging from inside of a locker in Bell's office. Is it an animal? How does Cassidy pretend it's not there? Is Bell some sort of criminal? You make allowances for friends' eccentricities of course, especially if you spent time being weird or outcast together, but, um, well, if it gets too obvious...

No, it's just that Bell is hiding her nine-years-ago self in that locker and doesn't want to have to explain things. And she doesn't, immediately, but it's tough to cover things up forever, and this is one of the many humorous threads that recur throughout the story. There are some leads in finding Cassidy's fiance, and you follow them all across a neat map of Toronto. Below the map are names, and a red arrow appears where they are on the map. This apparently was a big hit for people with an attachment to Toronto, and while it stirred up no memories in me, it's really well done and gives me some idea of how big the city is, and I was able to compare it to, say, a similar map of Chicago. I also like how the current characters in the scene have head shots–Bell-21 and Bell-12 on the left, and the person or people they're talking to on the right. The transitions worked technically, and the pictures are well imagined and drawn.

The Bells go to various places, visiting and revisiting them, and they meet casts of weird characters, even Bridget, whom Bell has broken up with. As someone not acquainted with Birdland, I didn't know Bridget in any way, but I still found her effective as a character. It's pretty obvious something is up, and I enjoyed Bell-12's reactions to a grownup she knew (Cassidy) and one she didn't (Bridget). Naturally Bell-12 starts bugging Bell-21 as to why they broke up. Through this all I had an occasional worry: is the time paradox going to blow up in our faces and make this whole story unbelievable?

Well, I don't know if it's ever resolved fully satisfactorily, but up until then there's a lot of fun to keep things going. Bell-12 has a lot of questions, which Bell-21 avoids, until Bell-12 keeps on asking. You have some agency in how much you tell Bell-12. But this certainly brought back how I would discuss things with Andrew-12 or Andrew-22. There's a lot to unpack, and I forgot how much there is to unpack even in the last ten years! It can blur together a bit. Bell-12 is decidedly more caustic than Andrew-12, asking the sort of questions I wished I'd asked, and having a mentor in Bell-21 who gave more good-faith answers than many people older than me.

The interesting characters about Toronto didn't land so well. I'm the sort of person who's not particularly interested in interesting characters, or if I think they are getting too obtrusive, I'm inclined to think "Stop showing off, already!" I can only take so much per day. Nevertheless, there's some good stuff in there with Bell-21 and a woman dressed like a cat, who seems like a potential villain, and having to return to the place that serves wings (Bell-12 and Bell-21 both hate to be caught dead there, for different reasons) provides character development. Bell-12 bugging Bell-21 about why Bell-21 broke up with Bridget is well done, even if the "aha, you're remembering what you liked about them" angle seemed a bit forced. A lot of good jokes and observations come out of this, well beyond narrative threads funneled into "Look! Bell realised that adults are weird and insecure and annoying but they have a good reason to be and are worth putting up with, even the obnoxious ones! And, um, yeah, humor, too!"

So it's a good sign that what to me were the less interesting parts turned out to be worthwhile, and I think the author had a strong idea of pacing–there's a shaggy dog story here, but it doesn't get too shaggy, although the reason for the fiance's disappearance didn't resonate with me. You have to deal with people you don't like, and it's tricky to pay attention to them the right amount without being fully transactional, which Bell-12 doesn't understand. Then you have to be annoying sometimes to get what you want, too, and Bell-12 encourages that (with Bell-21 ceding a few points) without getting too in-your-face. There's a lot to work with, telling one's younger self everything's not black and white, but also hearing your younger self remind you that intuition matters--presumably, you have more data to check your intuition at 21 than 12. There's knowing we can veer from certain big questions as we get older because focusing on some side issues is very interesting indeed, and if we can't do everything, we don't have to. And there's also poking oneself to realize, yes, there are definite dark and light greys where it's best to put nuances aside temporarily so, ahem, You Will Select a Decision to push ahead expediently and meaningfully.

I can't say I've run into an Andrew-12, but I did finally join my high school's graduating class's Facebook group, and it was like I was speaking to my old self, with things I remembered and people I remembered and may or may not have wanted to deal with. It was awkward, but I settled some things. GUDA brought back that, and new ways to look at things, and people and ideas and fears I'd forgotten, and I'm glad I was at least somewhat prepared for that.

Perhaps I'll be more prepared to replay GUDA once I've read the BPH works I've missed, especially Birdland. But I definitely found Birdland et. al aren't critical to appreciating GUDA, though, and even if GUDA didn't hit all the notes for me, it feels like it should hit a lot of really good ones for others who may or may not be familiar with BPH's works.

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Prism, by Eliot M.B. Howard

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Subterfuge and escape in a fantastic city, January 4, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

Prism was the last of the IFComp entries I played. There was a mix of anticipation and fear. I believe it was the last of the IFComp entries to get any review, and playing it, that was more people having a lot to digest than "hey, let's keep away from this weird mess." Looking at the review list near the end of IFComp, it had caught up, and I can see how the people who liked it would want to explore several branches before pronouncing a final opinion. We know we're going to miss something.

And we don't want to typing a mere "I liked this bit/this bit surprised me/this bit confused me." Maybe this review does that, in disguise. But Prism is a real wild card, one that half makes you feel guilty for giving something more conventional a high score. It's sophisticated and complex enough that blanket "gee this is cool you should try it" statements make me feel like a bit of a goober. It's like that tough class other people tell you to fear, but you wind up enjoying it, and you worry people might pound you for admitting that--until you find other people who like it.

Or, maybe, another way to put it is: you may be worried Prism isn't your thing. And maybe it isn't. But I think you will get a lot out of it, anyway, which is impressive, because it's not super-long. This sort of thing is more likely to happen with fifteen-minute games where you say, okay, they knew when to end the quirky joke and left me time and energy to enjoy the next one. But even in my sped-up mode, pressing to get through the final IFComp game, I realized I'd have a day to write a review for Prism, and my instinctive reaction was, I wished it'd be longer. Fortunately, there was an entirely different branch worth replaying!

So with the usual "I probably missed branches and themes" caveat I'm satisfied I got enough. If it's hokey to say "be glad the glass is half full and you like what's there," it's a lesson I still have to learn after trying to get through all the IFComp games. I've put off potentially rewarding experiences before, and the clues were there. But I'll be thinking of Prism when I balk at my next challenge or reading goal or whatever.

Prism is part of a whole phalanx of Ink entries which acquitted themselves very well in IFComp, in my opinion. In particular, it's a splendid complement to Elvish for Goodbye. Both are about an imaginary city and secrets you can't quite express, maybe even ones that would be ruined if you described them fully. In EfG, they're related second-hand, and that somehow makes them bigger. In Prism, you're in the middle of it, yet with your courier's job, you sense there must be even more than you're able to see, or you'd like to be able to see stuff even quicker.

Your friend, Karae, is partially to blame for this. You're pretty close, but she has holes in her life story, ones that should have been filled by now, the more time you spend together. She's missing an arm, but that's part of why she has power. You've seen a lot as a courier, but you know she's seen even more. You know the city you live in, Conduin, has grown from what was once pure desert, and it is growing, and you want to grow with it. There's a question of what new suburbs reveal the most.

I played through twice. Each time I had contraband to deliver, but it was radically different. My journey both times led me to people who talked unusually but logically, then out of the city, where I had to outsmart guards. I'd have felt rather helpless doing so if I were a newcomer instead of a courier--there was some knowledge assumed about which way to flee, so the choices didn't seem too zany. Each way it was pretty clear there was no way back, but the first time, it was about rebellion, and the second was more about finding my own way. Both entities I found outside the city suffered their own persecution. I saw my friend Karae in two entirely different lights.

It feels like there must be so much more than what I saw. The branching to two very different but believable escape scenarios is really impressive. Conduin feels even more sprawling after the second time than the first, and I want to explore even more. This feels like something that must have taken a good time to get straight, and the author also took some big risks that people might go "Huh? What?" And maybe I did sometimes, but I was fairly sure early on that this question would be answered. There's a whole assortment of mystics and criminals, and Prism feels like that food you can maybe order once a year, that you do and don't want to eat too quickly, and you're quite glad if you forgot about it for a couple months (I mean, assuming it keeps,) because you'll find the right other thing to enjoy it with. I suspect I'll find another game that will remind me I want to replay Prism with a new perspective, and enough will be forgotten that I won't sleepwalk through any choices.

I've talked a good deal about my impressions of Prism, because after two play-throughs, I'm left pondering a lot of possibilities for who might be the good guys and who might be the bad guys. This isn't due to vagueness on the author's part but rather that there's so much intrigue and nuance it'd be a pity if anything was too straightforward.

Oh, one final note: shout out to the author for noting where to save so you could see a bunch of options. This didn't apply in the second work-through, but by then, I had a pretty good idea where the bottlenecks were. On the one hand, this can seem like authors nudging players to the good part, but on the other hand, it can be more effective than a blurb for helping us know what to expect. There are that fewer save states to juggle.

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[IFComp 22 - Beta] Cannelé & Nomnom - Defective Agency, by Younès R. & Yazaleea

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Overbearing at first but stops horsing around soon enough, January 4, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

So. The bad stuff up front, first. There will be good stuff. But I want to list stuff you may want to zone out to appreciate the strong points of a work. It was necessary for me here. A personal confession about snark: it overloads me very quickly, in many forms. Heck, (political views ahead) I loathe Donald Trump and all he stands for (or how he stands against certain things and people) and am under no illusions of the scorn he would have for me if we met. Yet at the same time, I quickly feel deluged by constant anti-Trump snark that blossomed in early 2017. This was tough to sort out!

But I realized snark could, indeed, be draining, whether or not you agree with it. It's a way of saying "put up with me" without saying "put up with me." And the problem is, if unchecked, it really barrels people over. I've failed to appreciate snark properly in social circles, which got me Suspected of Things. I'm not good at snarking back and forth and don't have the energy--for a while, I thought it was that I didn't care. I think I've grown good enough with words over the years that I can defend myself, and I no longer feel I'm ruining a circle of snark, as a participant or spectator, by saying "hey, this is not for me." Because I feel tense and helpless around it. But hopefully I've gotten some perspective. I want it carefully curated, and if it crosses a line, I have no problem zoning it out.

This was necessary for C&N, but it was also worthwhile. Other reviewers have discussed their own reservations about C&N's snark, which I don't think is needed to establish the characters' eccentricities. They're not the first comically bad detectives in a creative work, and they won't be the last, but they have enough individual touches that they should be charming if they clean up their act in a sequel, which may include an episode to tie up loose ends the authors deliberately laid out. I just wish they'd have dialed it back from eleven. It's funny that they seem to talk about themselves when you're the one with amnesia, looking for someone-anyone to give you a clue about your wallet, or what a rainbow-colored cat was doing, but it shouldn't be oversold.

And while I'm on the hobby horse, I'm grateful I could hold down "space" to get through the dialogue – but it was frustrating to have to do so, and it caused me to miss a few links to click a few times through. The effect was like having to deal with a coworker on their break who doesn't recognize you have something important to do, or who slips in some genuinely awesome technical advice or ideas you'd like to google, but they just have to continue with the small talk that's run its course. This trick of portioning out dialogue the player may just want to get through often leaves me feel like the rat must, in one experiment where they get sugar water randomly when they push a bar. This is stuff I do on my free time! I don't want that, I want fun, especially if the game is a comedy!

And this is compounded by having a score kept track–who has gotten in a good dig at the other. I can't expect the authors to have trigger warnings out there for people keeping score, but fact is, people who do keep score in any form in a conversation for too long tend to be people I wanted to steer clear from. I was hoping for peace. So I think the authors went above and beyond what they needed to establish chaos.

That's the bad stuff. I think this is the harshest I've been on an IFComp entry, and when I do that, it's because I'd love the option to ignore this and work on the good stuff. Which is certainly there.

C&N's conspiracy board isn't just a clever name. There's a useful tutorial for how to pair post-it notes and connect them to a bigger theory. So that established what you would do: look for clues and see which are pieced together. One semi-puzzle in the game has you sorting out which post-it notes were valid, and which were just C&N babbling. I felt like I was getting a bit of my own sanity back in the process. Which was a nice gesture from the game. As was what I interpreted as a hobo paying money to make C&N go away. This establishes C&N's personality better than the lengthy dialogue.

Narrative and puzzles tie together well, too. You learn other people have lost their memory as well. There's a neat card game-slash-word game where C&N are sure you're being hustled, because the experienced players around you are acting forgetful! (I've played chess hustlers who let you win the first game.) How much money I had didn't matter. I always feared getting cleaned out. So the tension there was wonderful. The graphics are very high-grade, and combined with the cover art, it's impossible to miss that the authors have creativity, and they can control it with time and effort. And once C&N realize the hustlers actually lost their memory, it's an aha moment and a nice fake-out. It actually advances the plot.

I also feared the solution to the mystery might try to get too wild, based on the game's intro, but it's cute and sad at the same time, and it's a clever shell-game on the part of the antagonist. So I forgave a lot of the earlier red marks I'd come across. At game's end I was notified the spare post-its from C&N's small talk could maybe be arranged into something, and though I saw some quick possibilities, I was a bit emotionally drained.

There's a lot of care put into C&N and it just feels as though the authors guessed the wrong side of what we'd enjoy. It's tough to capture playful constant bickering versus endless constant bickering. It's heavy on artistic touches, but it gets carried away. Hopefully this sort of warning and assurance you're missing relatively little by skimming the dialogue will make C&N a pleasant experience worth the prep. I've had people where I was flattered they tried too hard to impress me. Whether those tries were specific to me, it didn't matter. What mattered was the follow-up, and on the evidence of that, C&N has a lot more substance and value for your time than the introduction suggested to me.

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Twelve Days, One Night, by B.J. Best

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A good small game that turns an annoying song on its head, January 3, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron 2020 Christmas Comp

Back in college, chain email jokes had started to be a thing. There was one Christmas joke about the twelve days of Christmas where, in fact, someone does get his true love the twelve gifts, and she winds up sending him a restraining order. From what I knew, nobody ever really liked that song anyway! So there was a bit of schadenfreude and a sense it might be overdone if it lasted for the length of, say, an Advent calendar.

12D lasts about the right amount of time, too. Anyone acquainted with the song will know what to do. There is a question of how. You have a bunch of gifts, not quite twelve, in your storage closet. You need to dump them in the room with the Christmas tree to the east. There's also a kitchen east of that. You have an inventory limit of three, as well. This is rather clever. It prevents brute force solving, and what's more, you have a list of gifts on your cell phone. So in case you forget what you have left or can do, you can read it. And, of course, if you haven't, you can drop it and have a bit more freedom to shuffle items to get everything in place. 12D gets a lot of mileage out of its only mechanic, which is that DROPping something makes you act on it unusually. This is most useful in the kitchen.

How 12D winds down is mechanically effective, as with each present you get in place (it is there in rainbow text,) there are fewer possibilities for your next wrong guess, and you may have a lightbulb go off. And if you place something in the present room before you're ready, there's some explanation why it doesn't quite fit. For instance, one of the three birds you need will fly away because your tree is not decorated properly. This is a good introductory puzzle, but you don't have to start with it. Some presents do rely on others finishing first, and it's all pretty logical. There's also a good deal of cluing when you wind up with, say, six of an item.

You'll also have to notice some puns or double meanings of words, which are kind of cute. There's even myrrh, too, and years after seeing The Life of Brian, an occasional "just what is myrrh, anyway" joke works well, even though I know danged well what myrrh is. None of the jokes bring down the house, and they don't need to, because they're quite effective all told and the sort of thing you need when you're slightly flustered trying to get presents organized.

So what feels like just schelpping items about is a good deal more sophisticated than that. There will probably be one present that you don't get at first, or something you DROP may do something by accident, and you have the a-ha moment.

That 12D placed next-to-last in the Adventuron 2020 Christmas comp and yet has over four stars on IFDB as of January 2023 is a strong indication that there's a lot of other stuff to look at. (I haven't much, yet, but I plan to!) If you are in the mood for a short game that gives bumpers but not outright spoilers and maybe could leaves you less annoyed at that one Christmas song (I was after playing,) it's very nice indeed.

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January, by litrouke

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Zombie stuff, hold the annoying zombie tropes, January 3, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

IFComp has a bunch of works that subvert expectations, some in-your-face, some trying it under the hood. January is one of the latest ones, more under the hood, more highbrow, and the mechanics work, though they may be a bit exhausting. There've been plenty of discussions of linearity, friendly or not, and my main takeaway is that I'd prefer not to have too many passages where you just click ahead for its own sake, and it feels like the work is tugging on your sleeve not to leave just now, because it has so much to say, honest it does, and you'll miss some of the deeper meaning if you do leave. So if someone wants to write something linear and give the player a fixed ending, while still giving them a chance to say "hey, what about that" or 'hey, what about this," how do they go about it?

January provides some good pointers. It's innovative, to me at least, and it forces the player to re-read without being too intrusive. It's illustrated, too. The illustrations provide a practical focal point, as it turns out, the way the story is organized.

It's a zombie survival story but a bit more than that. You can safely assume the narrator doesn't die right away, because after the first passage, you're presented a calendar. Something is ahead, likely dread. There's a moderate but not overkill amount of content warnings. A date early in January is circled. You can click on any circled date, and once you're through, there's an X. This was an interesting and relatively simple wrinkle to me, and it worked very well. I've been shocked by jumps before in a book, and even seeing "Three months later, X was still thinking about the incident" feels a bit clunky. It provides a bit of shock protection, I guess. Chapters end with a picture, which re-appears if a date goes from X'd out to red-circled, and then the picture reappears again. I liked the pictures, and I sort of needed them, after the rather bleak content.

I don't know much about visual novels, so I have no clue how much is the author's own innovation and how much they are pulling from general knowledge, but either way it's effective. The text changes dramatically, fading from old words to new ones to provide a different perspective, and my only complaint is that I can't (or I missed the way to) go back, because a lot of times I realized a detail was important, and I wanted to see more.

The work itself is more about loneliness than outright horror. Your family is infected with the zombie virus, and one infects someone else accidentally, or cluelessly. You find a cat to take care of, which I thought was one of the strongest focal points (I can only take so many details about survivalism,) and you realize there is a lot you don't know about, well, survival and life and how other people are getting along, but they must be out there. There's one passage where the warning for suicide kicks in, and it's not some stale old "woe is me, I have no friends." It's something I don't quite want to spoil. But I was certainly engaged in the story of the main character protecting the cat, even against the bodies of zombies they formerly knew.

I'm a bit disappointed I couldn't go back and revisit stuff I realized I skimmed over a bit. Perhaps that's a user error, but I still hope for something relatively linear and long to allow you to do so, because things get missed, especially when it drags you to re-read, then bam! No, you can't re-re-read to make sure of things. My usual refrain of "but I can look at the source" was mentally countered by "No, it's not the same thing, it's missing something." The ending bit where you can mouse over images to show different ones felt like end credits in a TV show, and they brought up a lot of memories. Maybe on point it hoped to bring up was there is a lot of stuff you forget when just in survival mode, whether that be with zombies, or people around you at a job you can't stand, or a horrible high school. There's also a twist there that other people found effective but didn't work for me. This is sort of harping on the weaknesses. I thought the strongest bits were the part that went beyond ZOMBIE PLAGUE and dealt with the "what if I get infected" and "maybe it's better if I do." Sometimes it felt like it didn't get out of its own way, but that's how legitimately experimental works feel. Overall, I'm glad it staked out new territory in the potentially tooth-grinding genre of zombie survival.

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Crash, by Phil Riley

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Sabotage, with a question of who did it, and oh, space chores too, January 3, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

Crash is commendably ambitious both narratively and technically. It doesn't mess around to start. You're given some trivial tasks to fix a spaceship (a microwave and cabinet are out of whack,) but of course those are just an introduction to the main plot. A spaceport to the side blows up. Obviously, someone needs to figure why, and you're the only person on the spaceship who can do so. Not because you're a detective, but because you're conscious. Not only that, you're on a crash course with a major spaceport! There's a lot of help early on with nice touches such as the Unicode character for an arrow. So I felt pretty comfortable attacking things early. And there was an in-game hinting system. I was making good progress while clueless of the very nice PDF walkthrough that came with the game.

My initial try, I spun out early, but the puzzles I solved, I was happy for. The scoring was neatly done, with a list of things you've fixed, want to fix and have to fix. In some cases it seems like there's an intentional bit of difficulty, for general humor or moving the plot forard. For instance, with a pair of bunks, I could CLIMB the one I didn't need to do anything, but the one I did, I couldn't. The alternative verb exhausted me for a bit.

Still, I had a lot of neat stuff to do and found it generally amusing to see or find what the solutions were. Like the microwave, which should be easy to fix, except I didn't have the right tools. Fixing the microwave, though not a puzzle requiring intense technical knowledge or deep building on what was there, had just the right sort of subversions and got that first point that said, gosh, I had Done Something, and of course it wasn't going to be super-simple right away. And I also enjoyed figuring how to go up from the galley containing microwave–you know something is there, and you hear voices, and it's a good part of the mystery, and it plays well on the fear of death and being lost. Then when you hear the voices, you have another choice to make.

I got stuck a bit after opening the way up, where double-checking the scenery got me "Really, the equipment trunk isn't important to the story. But by all means, continue to fiddle with it" and after a bit of wrangling
with the parser, this felt like someone was looking over my shoulder and saying "boy, you are clumsy with tools." I don't think this was the author's intent, and it may be gone in a post-comp release, Needling the player just the right amount is tricky, and a little snark can go a long way in the wrong sort of way, but hopefully forewarned is forearmed.

That's where I cut off in-comp. I'd started to see there were two people with opposite stories you needed to evaluate. I'd found a way to walk outside the spaceship. So I felt competent, even if I wasn't able to stop it.

So it's where I cut off, as I was at about the time limit, and I'd had a satisfying time, technical quibbles aside. Poking afterwards during a more relaxed time, I enjoyed the possible endings (failure, blowing the ship up without crashing into the city, success) and I'd even worked my way through a schematic with the help of some manuals. This is always tricky for me, as I like to play things to get away from technical manuals. And I wasn't sure if I would feel competent enough to make replay worth it, until the diagram made sense, and aha! There I went. The problem of trusting the Sergeant or Captain was interesting, and I certainly felt pressed to respond, but of course, I didn't have to.

Crash felt like a very enjoyable work that definitely wasn't my thing, and I always welcome those. The author's shown a great willingness to learn even more on the forums. And so Crash sort of has the feel of Marco Innocenti's first Andromeda effort in 2011 both because it's Sci-Fi and it involves an apocalypse and old-scoolish puzzles. In 2012, the second Andromeda effort won IFComp.

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Into The Sun, by Dark Star

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Spaceship scavenging maximizer with randomness and a deadly enemy, January 3, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

I can't help but link Into the Sun with two other IFComp entries that take place in space: Crash and A Long Way To the Nearest Star. Obviously, they're all three different games, but this intersected the other two nicely. And I'm aware it's a homage to Aliens, where I still haven't gotten through the series, and I forget what I saw. It's very much its own game. It has a lack of order the other two have, not in the "the author didn't bother to nail down their vision," but in a "you need to strategize here" way. I think when it comes to maximization games, I may've hit my, uh, maximum a while back. There's so much of my own stuff I want to fiddle with. I'd rather maximize my own writing, if not for others' pleasure, then for myself. But I still think it's a worthwhile and entertaining experience, even if I may have a certain amount of second-hand "oh, I can see how someone would do this" joy.

After just playing LWNS, I was ready to start using access cards and so forth to figure how to discover places, and, well, I needed a more violent solution right off the bat. As a scavenger, I'd been looking for a derelict ship to raid, and I needed enough money to be able to refuel and repair my own ship. Here there is no intrigue or politics. It's still a matter of life and death, and a more acute one, because you'd also like to avoid the bloodthirsty, massive, quick alien running around the ship. This is different from politics or sabotage or a cagey AI! Oh, and as the title says, this derelict ship is hurtling into the sun, so there's urgency outside the prospect of a violent end near the monster.

The alien's hard to avoid, too. It stumbles around randomly and persistently, and you have some clue where it is. You need to nearn how to navigate the ship's three levels, with maintenance elevators you can run around. Most importantly, you have a stun-prod with three uses. It will repel the alien temporarily. The alien's fast and powerful. You can't run once it sees you, so you'd better
be armed, though you can UNDO. This isn't a cure-all, as you can only guess if the alien has destroyed a room with a particularly valuable treasure, if it's far away. So you're left with the prospect of pessimism if too many rooms of little value are pristine. This brings a lot of tension as you replay, on top of, of course, the whole life and death thing if the alien is nearby.

I wasn't really expecting this, since the only other timed game with anything resembling violence is Approaching Horde! And that had a lot of humor. Here I had a hard time adjusting to all sorts of things, even getting port and starboard confused! This is my fault, but it also reminded me of how non-parser players might feel when faced with standard parser directions everyone knows. At the same time, I realize it's not a gimmick–there aren't really directions in space! It was easier in Crash for me to adjust because of the lack of ambushes, and also Crash had a smaller ship. Into the Sun's seems just about the right size. There's enough space to get around to start, and then you realize you'd better take the initiative to tear the ship apart before the beast does.

I quite bluntly had no clue what to do, as I don't think in "destroy this" mode. Then I read some other reviews and, aha, I managed to open some panels that were closed. No, I wasn't going to perform some electrician-style miracles here. There was no puzzle with colored wires. It took a while to get used to. And of course there was the random alien. It had destroyed almost everything the first time I managed to avoid it or explore most of the ship, and it was a while before I even got enough money to repair my ship. I still lost, technically, since I had no money for fuel.

This in itself felt like a victory for me, if not for my character. The game's rather intense, and I wasn't necessarily up for that, but I caught myself jotting down strategy. Touches like the service elevator were nice, as were finding spoiled rooms the alien had been to. A-ha, that might be good next playthrough when I know what I'm doing. I also like that I didn't seem to have to maximize everything and there seems to be a lot of latitude to find a strategy for the best odds of escaping. So while I thought I wasn't up to ItS's challenge on the day I reviewed it, in the stretch run before the comp closed, it pulled me through and got me to try some things I wouldn't have otherwise. I really enjoyed having the different stories based on money found, as opposed to just ranks.

An entry that helps pick me up and postpone or cancel severl "I quit" moments is very well done indeed. And that's where ItS fits. Perhaps I'll pull off a few more reviews and read them and see if I can maybe even retire with my haul from the ship. That's a sign of good game design. The author mentioned being inspired by Captain Verdeterre's Treasure, and I actually found the puzzles and story more compelling here.

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The Thirty Nine Steps, by Graham Walmsley

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Classic spy novel, adjusted to three flavors you can customize, January 3, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

I used to have a ton of Dover Thrift edition books. They were $1 at a mom-and-pop-ish bookstore. I bought up whatever I could. There were ones I knew, like A Shropshire Lad, and ones I didn't, like The Thirty Nine Steps. The physical book is gone, but an e-copy is on gutenberg.org, which sort of has everything–well, before a certain date. I didn't remember it very well, and I think that's the best choice for a project like this (or Dorian Passer's refiguring of The Lottery Ticket by Chekhov!) Too well-known, and it feels like a rehash no matter what you do. Yes, there's a movie by the same title, so it's known, but it's not overdone.

And I think the project works well. You wake up to notice Scudder, an acquaintance, has been murdered. How to escape and maybe figure out the who and why? This sort of thing lends itself to immediate choices. Whenever I read a book like TNS, I'd think "boy, I'd be too dumb or unobervant to make this choice, or I'd cop out." And though I gave the book a brief re-glance at Gutenberg, I couldn't really track how much was the original source and how much was needed to put parts of the original book into believable branches. Whatever the ratio is, it works. I noted some obvious changes: the cipher key is different in this work than the original book, which makes for a nice small puzzle without having to bang your head.

TNS is pretty up-front about the choices you can make. They're mostly classified into Open, Bold or Clever. There are no wrong ones, and you get the bad guys no matter what. But there's still a lot of tension. The music is effective and not distracting. And I wound up trying to play through while going heavy on each option, and I enjoyed the flavor.

Since you get vindicated in any case, you might then ask, what's the point of going through? Well, the more you observe correctly, the more of a story you get. You get out what you put in. With a bunch of bad or careless choices, I wound up saying "okay, yes, action, good." But when I made an effort to look around, things popped up. This might not work in a standard Twine story, but given that it's a spy story where there's supposed to be pacing, and the start is "someone is dead in your house and you don't know why," this makes a lot of sense–you can stumble through and be glad you're safe and have no clue what's going on, and the action in the meantime is breathless and branched enough that you can have completely different stories despite the core text being there.

So I thought this was a neat trick, though really it's more than a trick. There's enough to piece together that you have a story, but not so much you're confused. It's never self-indulgent, and I don't mean this as a pat on the head and a cookie for people or works that "can't be exciting" or "are efficient, at least." Flashy effects or embellishing critical passages would ruin the mood of the original book, since only the text is modernized and not the in-story environs. I enjoyed both the immersion and the realization that helpful technology would make a lot of the protagonist's concerns moot today (for instance, the cryptogram could be googled, as the hints point out.) True, more technology would make it easier for your pursuers, but it's really good to have a reminder that that's not needed for a good thriller. I retained a lot more images from this than from gaudier works. Perhaps that's because I read the original so many years ago, but I also think, beyond being a good story, TNS is a very neat and successful experiment in seeing how the writer or reader leaving certain things out can expand a work.

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Santa's Trainee Elf, by Garry Francis

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2 years later, still a great holiday present, January 2, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Adventuron 2020 Christmas Comp

STF intimidated me a lot the first time I played through it. The map is not small. But fortunately, when I sat down to take another shot at it with David Welbourn's maps, things went a lot easier. I noticed it placed 8th in the Adventuron 2020 Christmas jam, which left me thinking, "Man, how good are the seven ahead of it?" While part of the low placing may be that some people probably found it tough to get going, that can't be all--there must've been quality stuff ahead. And I'm glad I got to unpack this, over two years later. The advent (heh) of Adventuron had passed me by, so I missed this sort of thing, and I'm glad it's still fresh.

STF is very much a directed treasure hunt. You, as Eldrid the trainee elf, get a list of basic tasks to perform. They're pretty pedestrian kids' toys, the sort kids might not even really like these days. They're certainly not cutting-edge technology. But what can you expect, being at the bottom of the rung? Nevertheless, I was quickly left feeling that these toys would be fun to give and make in a way that, say, potion-mixing games to be strong enough to beat up monsters could never be.

You should quickly find a manual that tells how to make the toys, as well as a list of kids who are getting gifts. And since there are several supply rooms, you can get most stuff done by brute force. You can't run out, either.

But ... but ... the neat part is that you can and must leave Santa's house to find everything. That includes a lump of coal for the one bad kid on the list, which is probably the very easiest task. There are other items that are lying around, which are useful but replaceable, so you might as well take them. There are a few puzzles to get to special rooms. And there's one puzzle I find well-clued: Mrs. Claus asks you to get a box of gingerbread cookies from the top shelf of a pantry. You have a box, and it's not quite tall enough, and neither are you. It weaves in nicely with another puzzle, so that STF is about more than reading recipes and dumping stuff in Santa's sleigh.

Most of us poking around in text adventures have, of course, long since stopped believing in Santa. Perhaps we are cynical about the gift-giving of Christmas, with good reason. But here there are no ads or comparisons of expensive gifts or even stress over sending out holiday cards. (Note: gifts and holiday cards with people we care about are good things. But, well, they shouldn't feel obligatory.) And we may even be cynical about ways to bring the magic back. Somebody's profiting off it, right?

Only for STF, that wasn't quite it. I mean, just finding Adventuron existed was a neat gift at any time of the year, even though I didn't discover it for a few months. It was another nice way to connect that we sort of needed with COVID. And it was also something I dared wish for when younger: something more sophisticated than Sierra games, with lower load time and more colors. And a lot of the special effects, too, mirror something I'd have loved as a kid, and still enjoy now. The presents you find or build have alternating green and red text, which flies in the face of our cynicism about too-gaudy HTML. The pictures of each room are fun. The list of tasks changes them from red to yellow to green. It's cheery and practical, without any of the "Oh, it's holiday time, if you can't be cheery now when can you be cheery?" that it feels more commercialistic holiday routines, or holiday office parties or whatever, inflict on me.

Santa's place is pretty well drawn out, too. Some rooms are clearly blocked off, such as Santa's Bedroom, and there are NPCs willing to help you but also reminding you of your job as a trainee elf. Instead of making you feel small, period, this actually funnels you to your tasks and leaves some wonder of the sort of things you could do or see if you did your job right. And while the interaction isn't intense, there's the feeling you're working together with the other elves. In a neat touch, there's also a metals room for advanced toys where you don't need anything just yet. (You can verify this with your toy making manual.) It hints at perhaps a sequel which, even if it doesn't arrive, is easy to imagine. STF has a bunch of neat responses to custom verbs as well. So it's well-produced, and while I think even a middling game would've left me with unexpected gratitude, having something nice that someone made for free, in their own time, feels good.

Part of me is a bit upset I didn't discover Adventuron right away, but it and the Christmas jam and this entry were waiting for me to play, and I did. I wasn't expecting too much of a gift, but perhaps I was more in a frame of mind to enjoy it than I was two years ago. Also, I was suffering through Adventuron withdrawal--this year's IFComp game had no Adventuron games! So STF filled that void and also pointed me to where I could keep filling it. I've been fortunate enough to take advantage of a few neat no-obligation trial offers this holiday season. I appreciated them, even as I felt slight guilt about canceling them even though all that is baked into the business model. But I appreciate a nice experience like STF, with even fewer strings attached, even more.

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You Feel Like You've Read this in a Book, by Austin Lim

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
ransom-note thriller, book references extra, January 2, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

I love a good sneaky reference to a popular work I liked, and I love getting the reference–or even forgetting the reference and saying "gee, of course." The title indicated something more idyllic to me than what I got. Because, indeed, one of the endings is very dark indeed and makes a play on the original title. There are several, and since YFL is a tidy little game, you can explore it to see them all without too much trouble. I wound up almost missing one because of my eternal nemesis, timed text. (Note: it's used effectively somewhere else, and I also appreciated the use of colored text.) But I got them all, with help from the walkthrough, and enjoyed it. I'm not ashamed to admit I push ahead a bit, and if I have to look a couple times, I chalk that up to my own haste and obtuseness.

The plot is this: you wake up with a case of amnesia, only knowing there's a neurotoxin in your brain due to explode in 24 hours unless you find a $50000 ransom. That one day's enough, in game time (fixed number of clicks, plus there's that handy undo arrow) to look around quite a bit, but it also indicates bumpers so that the world is not too big. And what do you find? Well, you find your own apartment, and you find you're rich, though you never learn why. A lot of details are left unfilled, which I found a bit favorably creepy. You can also find or steal stuff to sell to the local pawn shop. You can get away with two straight-out profitable activities (your bank account gets you close to the magic number) but there are several things well worth finding and selling. Morality doesn't matter, here, and perhaps the item you get the least money selling would be priceless in any hypothetical black market of famous items found in books. Not only that, I don't believe buying it could ever push you over the $50000 mark. If indeed the author worked the numbers so this happened, congratulations to them!

There are a few ways to end. You can die, you can perform a ritual to get cured, or you can even visit a hospital as long as you get injured other ways. The hospital only takes the neediest patients, so you need to find a way to get injured more than once. The second way was a bit tricky since it required a bit of a walk around the map, which only had ten rooms, but with the repetition involved it wouldn't be surprising if some people had the right idea but then backed off.

This all gives a much more different impression than you'd expect from the title. I expected high fantasy or absurdism. I got a bit of a thriller-mystery. And that doesn't quite match up with the book allusions for me, even with how I saw they were supposed to work against your amnesia. Some do feel a bit shoehorned in, and the game is left feeling mechanical and generic for that part, though--of course you want to see all the references, once you've read a few! I can also see some people not quite getting that different things can happen at different times, even though the world should be small enough you can traverse it more than once before dying. I didn't recognize one or two of the books, too. My lazy side would also have preferred the undo/redo arrows be closer to the bottom where I did most of the clicking, though of course there's always tabs. None of this is fatal, but it certainly let me feeling needlessly slowed. But I liked what I saw, and based on YFL, I have a couple more books to add to my list.

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Hanging by threads, by Carlos Pamies

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Brief branching city exploration with intrigue and instadeaths, January 2, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

Recon, the author's entry last year, had a lot of moving parts and a backstory that took a few playthroughs to put together. HbT is similar–it's a lot smaller, but it feels more organized, and it's still fantastical, though the fantasy veers toward general abstract stuff more than sci-fi. I think it's a technical step up, but there were a few design choices that made it hard for me to say what I wanted, as quickly as I wanted. I'm not surprised a few reviews rolled in late. There's an unexpected hard break just when it seems things are starting, and people may wonder what's up. Sure, we see the "end" in small print below a separator, but it's not clear how or why until we've played through several times. I thought I'd just walked into a death trap, and I didn't see what I did wrong.

Once I realized that there was a sort of timer where you make so many moves and then just die, things picked up. I was able to plan out relatively modest goals, deciding what part of the city to explore, and how. This is hampered slightly by being unable to reload, at least on Firefox, even with a complete refresh. Fortunately HbT isn't huge.

It starts with a cute puzzle, the sort I felt was the strength of Recon. You are told to choose the shortest stick, and you get a sneak peak, with several different spellings of "stick." These sorts of HTML tricks seem very easy until you have to think of one yourself, and if and when you guess right, you get one of three items. Each is specifically useful at some point in the city, and it's fun to find that point and then do things with or without that item and compare and contrast. I'd consider finding all six such states to complete HbT, such as it is.

There's definitely weirdness about, and for the most part, it works, but I was frustrated that the turn-limit cap along with options such as "turn right/turn left" that didn't give me enough information to work with. So it was a matter of more weird detail, please! You want to feel helpless, but not too helpless. I think some sort of timer can and should be integrated in a post-comp release, and I'd also have liked the cut-outs not to interrupt a choice I made beyond traveling somewhere new. Surely there's a way to incorporate a game flag and also to say, okay, the story won't end just before you get to talk to someone. As-is, it was a bit jarring. It seems like a forgivable oversight, but it's also a high priority when it comes to revision.

I think these issues impacted the replayability the author wanted to give the player and which, with the game text, seemed even more rewarding with a smoother gameplay experience. I might even suggest a small bonus to people who keep replaying, as payback for their faith. Note the timer, not with just a number but with narrative cues, and also maybe fill in details of paths they have already seen. It's tricky, but I think that would combine the whole "you can't explore everything at once" aesthetic with "you don't want to repeat yourself too much." Perhaps I'm greedy, too, but the ability to constantly restart as with Let Them Eat Cake might open the way for a grander vision once you've hit all the six states I mentioned above. UNDO might be a bridge too far, but I'd also like to get greedy and maybe track which branches have been fully explored and which haven't. This is nontrivial coding, but it seems worthwhile.

I was glad to see reviews pour in late for HbT, because it deserved them, but I'd also have liked it to be less forbidding, and the forced game-over probably intimidated people. So I'd be very glad indeed if my main questions became obsolete! How much you should push the player back is tough to judge, but it's not clear to me right away why things should stop completely, and I think people legitimately had trouble figuring things out. Here's where my great enemy timed text would be quite welcome, before a "restart?" link popped up. It would be an appropriate penalty for a player's inattention. There are other solutions, too. Unrolling everything too quickly here wuld probably ruin the author's vision, but I think a compromise would be welcome.

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A Matter of Heist Urgency, by FLACRabbit

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
An exciting mini-whirlwind of crime, mumbling ponies, and pirate fight moves, January 1, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

It's hard not to enjoy a game where you play as an animal. And in AMHU, my biggest groan was realizing I'd missed the pun in the title. (If you missed it: highest/heist.) It's a bit less serious than last year's Finding Light, to say the least. You're Anastasia, the Power Pony, and through this brief game you collect evidence after the crown jewels have been stolen, then you go fight the baddies to retrieve said crown. The only other entry I can think of offhand that does this is Peter Nepstad's Slap That Fish, and there, you're fighting with animals as weapons (Anastasia's weapons are her hooves,) and there's more strategy and less to do outside of that. MoHU allows for a good deal of showmanship and style points that weren't my thing, but I was glad they were in there. They fit the comedic tone of the heist.

The evidence collection is not hard. You do it considerably better than Sir Ponyheart or Commissioner Mumblebumble, who is true to his name. Sir Ponyheart understands the Commish, but you can't. The evidence quickly points to some evil llamas, and once you track them down, the fighting starts. This is one case where excessive disambiguation works. It captures that you're beating up a bunch of llamas at once, like a true action heroine.

And the author makes it hard to lose, with the focus on humor and creating a detailed fighting scene rather than intricate puzzles. The main thrust seems to be cluing you how to perform fighting tricks. The fight's on a pirate boat, and anyone who's enjoyed a pirate movie will be able to figure a couple of them and will probably want to. This factors into your rank at the end of the game. I'm not sure you can really lose, as there seems no ending besides the default, where you-the-character leave slightly disappointed, but I-the-player did not. I was amused by it, as well as the in-game good-bad puns. And the title. It's genuinely good-hearted, and my fears it might get too twee never materialized. It seems like a really good type of entry to expose interested people to the parser, too, because it's got a clear vision of what it wants and achieves it without feeling light-weight, and in a fight sequence, well, custom verbs seem almost necessary. I even appreciated the music, which feels like a really neat chiptune tribute and is appropriate for such a bouncy game.

AMHU already has a post-comp release, and I'm glad it did. I can't be the target audience, but that doesn't matter. I really don't care much about pirates, and the bonus content for choreographing pirate or dance moves or similar things isn't something I'd prioritize. That doesn't matter--I wound up enjoying the craft, and it's the sort of entry that makes me glad I at least tried to hit all the IFComp entries. I probably won't play the post-comp release due to general time concerns, but it's cool to imagine the possibilities opened up by the author's change logs, and given the good work they did in-comp, it's good to see they're dedicated to their craft and this won't be the last thing they write.

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The Counsel in The Cave, by Josh

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Reflective post-HS piece with questions worth asking at any age, January 1, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

When I was going off to college, or even just after college, I wish I'd have felt free enough to write something like this. It hits on themes I wondered about, and it cut through many "wiser" adults' assumptions about college quickly. It might not soar for your average reader. But it was in the right place at the right time for me, and I think it discusses the sort of universal themes we need to read more about. Looking back, I'm shocked I can't remember someone else trying for this in IFComp, at least for the years I reviewed. CIC has the interesting, wild choices of Elvish for Goodbye and the coming-of-age of Doug Egan's Roads Not Taken from a few years ago. And it also parallels, in part, Mike Russo's Sting. This was the life of someone who'd been given a lot of opportunity but still had questions about things. It didn't enforce its criticality on you. And tht worked great for me. In this case, Sting's main character is rather more privileged than CIC's, having gone to a prestigious East Coast private school, then to Cal-Tech, so the author labeled that character as privileged. The characters in CIC are doing well, but not quite so well.

The two main characters, May and Jason, have both graduated high school and are going to college: May to Temple, Jason to Lehigh. They're both from Bucks County, which is north of Philadelphia, where Temple is located, and east of Bethlehem, where Lehigh is located. (You may not recognize Bethlehem, but it's next to Allentown, which was the subject of a Billy Joel song. Both were hit hard in the eighties when the steel industry lost jobs. They've made a comeback, and they seem likely bigger than May and Jason's home town.) So there is a literal fork in the road and going in different directions for them both, and it's one that can't be avoided.

As for myself? Well, I haven't been in college for a while, but I must be close to the target audience, since I am sort of between Sting and CIC. I moved from one relatively acclaimed public school near an acclaimed public university to one near a private one (Purdue, up to middle school, to Northwestern,) but I went to classes with a group who figured Temple and Lehigh were nice and all, but you really should do better. I never really felt comfortable there, and I in fact worried that I wasn't really trying hard or didn't want to learn, or whatever, or if I couldn't succeed here, I certainly couldn't really succeed or thrive in college.

As it was, I went to a university that itself probably look down on Lehigh and Temple, even though the Ivy Leagues look down on it in turn. (Side note: it claimed it was tougher than some Ivies. The perils of comparison, which is the sort of thing people told me I needed to do more of!) However, it did have a good creative writing program, which I discovered a bit too late. I wound up trying to take advantage of it, but also feeling like I was an outsider who never quite fit in. I had my chances, and I had my moments, but somehow, I felt like I was wasting the college experience. I see that now I wasn't, and if I'd started earlier, I've gotten a lot out of it. Perhaps saying that I know I missed something and I want to recover it without going full midlife crisis is useful for me. People said college was about asking questions, and of course ideally, it is about opening up those questions which last a lifetime and are worth asking no matter what your career is, or how big your office is or whatever. And CIC's are.

That's my story. It's not quite May's or Jason's, but theirs would have helped me bring things into some perspective even if CIC quickly laid an egg. But it didn't. They asked questions I'd had before I convinced myself weren't really relevant or suited to my skill set or to all the opportunities high school gave me. They were the sort of person I'd have liked to meet in college, regardless of university entrance exam score. I didn't realize not only did other people share similar than me and they're worth having, but you could do so and still do well in classes or whatever. It just required more effort and sacrifice. To be frank, I am a bit jealous that somebody was able to express these thoughts at an earlier age than I was, but hopefully I have the maturity to be glad if I got something out of it. And I got a lot.

CIC presents itself in three parts: Shiloh Hills, Lost on Layers' Edge, and Counsel in the Cave. You can play through any of the three chapters repeatedly, making the interface very smooth. As May and Jason talk, you're presented with choices of how to take the conversation, from fear to hope, and so forth. And I think this is done well, as you often have a choice between two plausible but different emotions, and in the flashback or fantasy scene, the choices are always exciting. I'd like to compare it to a choice-based game that did much better in IFComp, Creatures Such as We, and it took a while to express why CSaW didn't do much for me. There, you had choices, but it felt like the author was constantly saying "C'mon, one of these is good, right? Right?" or mayve they were giving you a personality survey to "surprise" you at the end with a gift you couldn't decline and had to like. Sometimes I related to none of the four choices given. I don't sense a lot of this sort of people-pleasing in CIC, and it was refreshing, because CIC is wanting to be about more than people-pleasing and yet at the same time, you want to fit in somewhere.There was a certain amount of "I'd like to let my mind wander, and not around you, if you please."

CIC let me push back if I needed, or let me blow off the rare choices I didn't care about, so I quickly stopped caring How Good It was or What Its Place in Posterity Might Be. i enjoyed having to go forward with what I picked but also being able to look at the other choice or choices too after too long. I'm the sort of player who can lapse into "okay, I'll just choose the first choice and see what happens." That didn't happen here.

The first part felt the strongest for me, because it quickly brought up good and bad memories as well as fears or dreams, and it let you decide what to dwell on, both as May and Jason. Moondog, an old fisher you meet in act two, feels a bit too old-and-wise at times, with some mystic advice, but once I accepted this was a bit of a trope, things worked better. The third part includes a lot more surrealism, and the thing about surrealism for me is, I can't judge it unless there are clever jokes. I think at some point I was saturated with my own thoughts and just clicking around a bit to see if anything hit me directly. Overall, though, I got the feeling that May and Jason were both waiting for a sign to move on, and at the end, they sort of got one, but they realized they couldn't and shouldn't expect it in the future.

I suspect with CIC there were chunks where I sat back and just heard what I wanted to hear or read what I wanted to read, but I got a lot from it anyway, and it very much beats the alternative. There are works that hope youdo t that, and there are those that let you, and CIC is in the second, which is preferable. I've played through a few times now, and I feel sure I missed something, and I'm okay with that. It means I'm actually searching and interested and don't want to close the door on those questions. There's a surprising amount of wisdom in there for someone who is as old as the author seems to be from their Twitter bio. And I wish I'd let myself try to write something this good when I was their age, even if it hadn't nearly been as successful. CIC quickly reminded me of some former concerns and put other long-term ones in new perspective. I hope this is higher praise than the adults who told me "Oh, hm, yes, you ask important questions. I asked them too at your age!"

Final meta stuff: the author had two entries in IFComp. The Hidden King's Tomb was the less successful of the two. I imagine writing HKT was itself the sort of experience Jason and May both fear and anticipate. They're worried they won't succeed. They wonder what they're there for. They wonder if things are worth sharing. They're worried they won't hit their potential, or their potential has a ceiling. And HKT missing the mark adds to CIC in a way a more successful entry maybe could not have.

We understand that this person is good, and they've shown it, and they just missed the mark, not due to laziness but becaue they took a chance worth taking. They deserved, and deserve, to show up and say what they had to say, and maybe they didn't use their time the best way. That doesn't matter. They've looked for something beyond what was necessary to get by, and they found something or they said, you know, I didn't get all of that, I would like to do more.

We saw last year how Infinite Adventure cleverly added to BJ Best's comp-winning And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One, but that was intentional. HKT feels less intentional and more real for all that. Because it's an old saw to say that you should try new things, because so what if they don't work out? It's hard to express, though, just by writing something that doesn't work out. With the author's two entries, we get to see both, and my general feeling is: the author will get their next Inform game right, if they choose to write one, and they did the right thing sticking their neck out or maybe even taking on too much this time. Next time, it won't be too much. But they may have found bigger and better things to do.

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TOMBs of Reschette, by Richard Goodness

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Tongue in cheek RPG stuff, December 31, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2015 Reviews

It's been a while, but the author requested that people not spoil things, if they figured out what was going on in TOMBs. I still won't, explicitly, but I'm caught between not writing a review at all and explaining why I liked what was going on. And years later, I sort of forgot, and I sort of remembered. Did I only like TOMBs for the novelty value at the time? Most text-adventure RPGs I'd read were a bit too earnest, which helped it stand out. But when I poked through, I was able to enjoy it again and notice the snarky bits that gave me pleasure.

It's sort of a relief, in IFComp, to have something where you can just kill a bunch of monsters for a bit. Sadly, a lot of these entries have little more to offer. But I knew the author knew what he was doing, so I had a Trizbort map ready to go for a nice big dungeon. I would kill everything. I would go in for level-grinding. I didn't particularly want to empathize with anybody, or anything. I'd get to those entries later. In TOMBS, I would do some hack-and-slashing.

But of course I wanted to make sure I didn't miss any secrets! I got the feeling I would need a few, to beat the big bad beast. Reading the book in the library was the first inkling that there was more to adventure than the usual. I remembered the monsters I'd disposed of. I became curious what the ?'s were for. And I enjoyed having "limerence" as a stat, because it's a great word people don't know too much about. You may, but if you don't, it's the concept of being in love with love instead of, well, with people. And it's not an especially good stat for surviving in an RPG. So it sort of clues us into how things aren't quite right. Here we’re in love with the idea of nobility, etc., or improving ourselves through fights, but if we are just sitting grinding at some game, are we really improving?

So the second time through I managed to do more than just kill everything, and I used the previously ???'ed options. Some irony here: I didn't go face the beast for so long because I figured "that would just kill you, right? I'm not strong enough, and besides, I've been doing nice things, so I don't want my fate." So in a way I was paying for my bloodthirsty mentality even when I intellectually knew what to do.

The game made me feel trapped in level grinding, too, not hopelessly trapped but enough to get me the feeling there should be more. It was small enough, though, I was able to reload and see if there really was something else and say, okay, I’m not doing this. So many games are built to get players to keep playing even when it’s not fun, and ToR turns that notion on its head. We need more of this.

As for the final message? Well, it’s one we’ve heard before, but it's been too mushy or melodramatic other places. And it puts your earlier defeats of the beast, and the text from that, in perspective. Looking back, stuff like the chest guarded by bats also clued me, if I’d been paying attention.

So there are a lot of fun lessons in this game we don't realize are lessons til they’re done. And I think that’s very, very good. It's a case of having a bunch of independent jokes that have a 5-10% chance of working or making the light go off, but because there are twenty of them, it will happen eventually.

ToR is not the first subversion of RPGs, but it's one that doesn't shove the observational humor or retread fourth-wall observations in your face. As you explore, evidence piles up that something's wrong, and you can have a good laugh at what you've missed. You may even miss stuff even knowing it's a subversion, as I did on replay. I suspect many people may have missed this and downgraded ToR as just a collection of jokey shticks and feel superior to it and say, ok, maybe the next game will be a REAL game. But it looks like enough people, indeed, got it.

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The Thick Table Tavern, by manonamora

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Bartending for profit and dream-chasing, with nice atmosphere, December 31, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

I'm not big on alcohol, in general. I was fortunate to learn quickly that it doesn't work for me, and there were other ways to loosen inhibitions that did more harm than good. Yet as a kid I remember looking at all the drinks in bars and how people might mix them and it seemed like magic or artistry, perhaps even more fun than mixing a root beer float. The reality of bars was drearier, though. I still loved Cheers growing up, but that was much more for the characters. They all had their flaws, especially Sam, the bartender. But it was must-see TV, and my later (slight) experience in bars never came close to that. There were other TV bars, too, such as Phil's in Murphy Brown or McLaren's Pub in How I Met Your Mother or even (if for all the wrong reasons) Paddy's Pub. Again, they seemed more fun than the real thing. Also, there was the occasional illicit game of Tapper, or even Root Beer Tapper, at the arcade, with an amusingly violent end when you failed to schlep brews in time. Then later there were bars in RPG where you found information or new recruits or, perhaps, found experience-gaining fights. That seemed to cover it all. But T3 provides a new perspective: you're an employee who likes where they are, but you want to do better.

The production values for T3 are established early: the "wait, loading" graphic is a neat green snowflakey tesselation on a tan background. There's been a lot of thought put into the design, and it's not just about looking pretty. The whole experience is very smooth, and at the core, it is about mixing drinks, though there's a neat subplot as to why you want the money at your tavern job. And of course the title is very cool. It suggests some rough clientele who dig their knives into the table, just because.

So where does your bartending pay go? What are you saving for? Well, you've got a leaflet about joining an adventure academy, with a 300 coin fee for a course that starts in one week. This all feels a bit fourth-wall. In fact, the scenes at the beginning and end drive this home a bit too much for me, but on the other hand, that's probably my major complaint, and I'm not sure what I'd had the heart to cut out. Overall, T3 fell into the "I was just having fun and really paying attention, so I feel half bad for noticing this missing detail" camp. I recommend you do the same. I enjoyed many moments throughout the game, even ones the author probably did not angle for–for instance, I had a slow internet connection, and so the graphics of the various drink ingredients that appeared behind the bar popped up in amusing fashion. It almost gave the feeling the drinks were about to fall off the shelf, and I think it fit in well with the general lack of organization the author established was endemic to the tavern itself.

The mechanics are simple enough. You're the barmaid, and you mix drinks. Get them right, and you get tipped well. Miss, and you don't. You can decide whether to knock the tavern sign for luck (Roscoe, the owner, gives you a trivial fine) or to leave your tip box out, too. It might get stolen. I made sure to save before making the decision for the first few days, but I got absorbed enough that I forgot later, which is a good sign. (This almost bit me later, but the details are a spoiler.) You have a frenemy relationship with Brom, the cook, and Ez, who serves the food. Roscoe isn't very reliable, but it'd be boring if he was. People play stupid pranks on each other during slow times. Coffee isn't just for the customers.

I played on easy mode, so I was under no time pressure, and I assume the recipes were there for me to take my time with, so I did not miss out. It wasn't just easy mode that made T3 feel welcoming. I particularly enjoyed how certain syrups or fruits would be lumped together. Perhaps this is done behind the bar regularly, but in this case, I think the author nicely avoided clutter. You want it to be busy, but not too busy. The pull-outs for applying garnish were very charming, too, and I liked that I had to use some minimal reasoning to get some drinks working. For instance, there's only a specific section for citrus fruits, but if you're asked for oranges or lemons or limes, you just have to click there. So there's no need for additional futzing! You don't want everything done for you, but it's nice when a game trusts that you do, indeed, get it.

With all this, the first two days, with generic customers, were more than enough to help me adjust to the curve. I was ready for more challenge, and this came (one of those neat moments I don't want to spoil,) and it was pretty clear how this would fit very well into the timed/arcade version of the story. Then there were two special customers. Contrasting their goals with yours worked very well, I thought.

This special encounter helped me scrape by after just five days of the seven allotted. I tallied up my tips, and yes! I had just hit the mark! There were good-byes, and they felt appropriate, as I felt enough of a kinship with my coworkers. But once I'd moved on, I wanted to go back and mess up a bit to see how long things would last and whom else I could meet in those remaining two days, or even how my coworkers would react if I did not meet my goals.

It wasn't until the end of the story that I realized I hadn't used the cognac to mix anything, and I was never called on to use the paper umbrella! As a fan of The Jerk, this made me sad, but now I wonder if adding them willy-nilly might have gotten me bonus coins. The cognac felt like a sort of Chekhov's gun, along with the rattling tip box, and it's moments like this, where something you looked forward to didn't materialize and you still had fun, that make you realize what a smooth, enjoyable ride you had.

T3 established high standards quickly and gave my mind time to wander free. I've often thought of the good-citizen concept of IFComp entry, and sometimes it feels like "you didn't have anything profound to say, and you didn't pretend to! Yay, you!" In a way, yes, but in another way, this is something to enjoy and see things from a different perspective, and you don't need anything profound, and the game never taps its foot and expects you to find profound stuff. You know you don't need tense life-or-death situations to have revelations, or to remember something cool, or to say your own experiences are worth sharing. Plus it reminded me of those baffling bartender books I remembered seeing, and I never actually wanted to mix drinks, but I wondered what was in there. I did find trivia I might like to correct for a post-comp release, but in this case it would be an excuse to generate more deserved publicity. I think it's definitely one of the cheeriest and best-produced IFComp games, and it clearly doesn't rely on its production values only. It's a game about friendship and goals that doesn't get mushy. Part of me wants to try the arcade mode to challenge myself on replay, but the other part is worried I might miss a part of the story I meant to revisit.

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Good Grub!, by Damon L. Wakes

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Low-level, self-aware heckling is the best kind of heckling, December 30, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Spring Thing 2022

Good Grub embraces its limitations as a no-frills Twine game enthusiastically, and I think it does so without going overboard. Teaching facts without coming off as pompous is tough. And with GG, the idea is that bugs are good to eat. We've heard it, but unfortunately, the people loudest about this are the least likely to listen. GG takes a fake on-the-nose tone through it all, though there's not a ton. It reminds me of that clip in Wayne's World where Alice Cooper and Pete Friesen, his guitarist, educate Wayne in semi-stilted voices about the history of Milwaukee. I still remember these facts, and the presentation to this day! And I enjoy it when I find it elsewhere.

GG can't master Alice and Pete's voice inflections, being text and all, but the script is decidedly snarkier, and it works well for the time it takes. It's about starting a restaurant. It pokes you if you try to guess something wrong, but often in random ways. For instance, choosing the worst possible name for your restaurant gets a "Stop that. Try again." But other things that seem less fatal do, in fact, ruin your budding business. This sort of randomness has been done before in Twine games, but it's not purely zany here. The choices are always fresh. With easy UNDO, it's fun to see which actually matter, too, because GG is short enough you can do that without getting exhausted.

It's hard not to sound a bit moralistic or preachy when talking about subjects such as sustainability, and GG's tone works throughout. You take transport to your interview, where the reporter tries your fare. Your restaurant's success is at stake! It's a surprisingly dramatic moment.

GG is a good blend of entertainment and teaching--nothing too deep, but there can be a thin line between preaching and giving people a boost and encouragement for open-mindedness. Lots of people still don't like the thought of eating bugs--they prefer to eat smarter, more sentient animals. So it's a good tongue-in-cheek advertisement for that sort of thing, as well as the author's other games.

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Dream Pieces, by Iam Curio

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Build letters into words, with optional rhymes, December 29, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

I tested Dream Pieces for IFComp 2013 and remembered enjoying it, so I pulled it out again. It wasn't a hugely complex game, but it has a premise it was hard to dislike. You are in your room and need to get out, because it's your birthday, and there's a party waiting for you. There are items in the room you can break up. For instance, a desk breaks up into a DE and a K. You don't use the S.

Some things, you can't break right away, and you need an item that can destroy them. Building such an item is the first puzzle. Another is for destroying really big items. I enjoyed this whole process of building and destroying, and if it's a bit on rails, I think that's better than being too arbitrary--I found the puzzles challenging without being too frustrating, though there's a small risk they may be not challenging enough or not user-friendly enough either way. But on the whole, I like the balance. There are limited items, and if you understand the conventions of parser games, you know what you need.

What I'm really impressed with is the stuff I didn't remember. The author has done some neat work to improve DP post-comp. Rhymes are optional--I remember some reviewers bemoaned the rhymes, which I think are good for a non-native speaker. There are cheery sound effects when you do something right, and color coding may help you figure what goes with what. Quest allowing drag-and-drop or clicking for verbs is a big help, too, and this is one area where it might be better than Inform. You don't have to guess the verb.

DP feels like a neat wordplay game for people who enjoy the genre but might not be really hard-core. After many years, I was glad to come back to it, and I enjoyed seeing the features I forgot, some I now remembered the author saying "I can sneak that in before IFComp" and others he said he might like to try post-comp. He did.

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Approaching Horde!, by CRAIG RUDDELL

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Efficient real-time resource management and humor, too, December 29, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

Me and all caps don't get along so good all the time. Well, almost none of the time, to be honest, if I'm not the one typing 'em. And when an author puts their name in ALL CAPS, that's a bold move that could BACKFIRE! The author furthermore doubles down with a zombie game. Many of you may not remember IFComp back in 2010, but there were a lot of zombies in the entries back then. It was a weird coincidence, but then, each year there's sort of bound to be one of them. I'll cut the birthday paradox-related calculations here. And I was sort of tentative looking at this game. The introduction seemed like it was going for humor, which seemed odd for a zombie game, and I wasn't sure what to expect. Bluntly, I wasn't optimistic.

As it turns out, I played AH three times before even starting on a review for the authors' forum, and it turned out to be one of those gapper entries I play before more serious IFComp stuff (Anything too complex and I, uh, turn into a zombie and procrastinate.) It's really not a text adventure, and it may not be a great fit for IFComp, but it gives great fun for relatively little investment. It's more a real-time resource game where you can, if you want, just plug things in and let them run. It takes twenty minutes, under the half-hour it says it does in IFComp, and it's almost all big-picture stuff. You are in charge of a fortress the zombies will eventually break through, but until then, you can maybe build tunnels are research a cure for the zombie infestation or try to kill the zombies. I tried killing them. It failed.

There was a lot to digest at first. You assign people to jobs: Farmers, Guards, Builders, Researchers, Hunters, Scavengers. You can recruit more people with hunters and scavengers, or you can go out and kill zombies. Farming is necessary for food, and there's also a morale component. It's pretty relaxing, for a zombie apocalypse, with the main problem being clicking the pluses and minuses to switch people from one task to another. At the end, you are the star of a newspaper article, for better or worse, and you get a notebook log of your time in the bunker. The first time I read this, a few things at the start of the story clicked. I suppose I wasn't quite ready for the humor the author threw at me, so I'm glad I backtracked. Things made more sense the second time through, and I knew what to expect. I realized I was supposed to be laughing a bit more than I did

I confess I went in for easy mode (there are normal and hard,) but the in-game help (a note on the wall) points out that you can actually lose survivors who find your compound because, you know, it's risky hunting out there at the higher levels! It also contains mechanics for roughly how often hunters find supplies, and so forth. And I simply watched as the progress bars filled up–they start once you assign people to groups. Each one can have up to four tasks, and when they're filled, improvements happen. For instance, farmers can either create food or increase production. Research can increase maximum food production. So it's multi-layered. Recent events are presented in a sort of ticker-tape display, where you allocate resources but above the game-hint and general ground observation parts.

I never had food or happiness bottom out, but I had survivors not join because I seemed low on food. Now I've played through a few times, I wonder if I missed a funny ending based on losing all my survivors or food. At least on easy mode, it's not hard to win. I indeed got the cure the first time, and I escaped with 30 of my 50 companions on the second, trying to build a tunnel. Trying to shoot down the zombie hordes by building up crazy firepower failed. As I played through I also realized some allocations were wasted on easy mode (e.g. the radio tower, since I wasn't losing survivors) and also that I could get away with skimping on food or happiness, and I saw ways to help keep my troops lean and mean. I bet there are more.

Horde! definitely falls on the game side of the game/story continuum, and I'm glad it did. It's good enough that the author has earned the right for sure to present his name in all caps. It fits in well with the unsubtle, confident humor. I could see myself replaying on medium or hard. I like how I was able to get up and walk away for a few minutes, or switch tabs. Maybe zombie apocalypse simulators shouldn't be so stress-free, but I enjoyed being able to poke around, and it certainly put me in a more welcoming mood for the more serious zombie entries that might be ahead. It's legitimately replayable, too. So, Mr. CRAIG RUDELL, well done. Oops. WELL DONE.

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Witchfinders, by Tania Dreams

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Engaging enough, but a bit too straightforward maybe?, December 29, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

In Witchfinders, you play as a potentially suspected witch who wants to help people with their problems back in 1800: sick cattle, a fever, etc. You have a witch score that determines how suspicious you seem, and when it gets to a certain point, you're in for it. I got to the best ending with maximum points after a couple tries, as the game's well-clued for success, and as you'd suspect, generally being hush-hush helps you a lot. The strongest part to me was having to keep your methods hush-hush, even if they didn't seem particularly magical. It's pretty clear they're actually helping people overall (there's a mix of common sense and alchemy,) but you can't say it, so louder, more powerful people prevail. So everything works, logically. And I gained a favorable impression of this work, but it's one I feel has untapped upside. So I have criticisms.

Because it never really soars, and a big reason may be an uneven translation. There's an attempt at Scottish dialogue, which works to my limited ear, but then there's a more contemporary narrative voice which pervades the dialogue, so the sense of place is disrupted. For instance, at game's end, you're asked "I guess we hang out for a while here?" which was not something said before 1950. There also seem to be several translation errors–they're mistakes a native speaker wouldn't make, though it's pretty clear what the author meant to say. The inclusion of points of out 100 also feels a bit off-key. It's good to know how far along you are, but on the other hand, in a relatively slice-of-life game with no ultimate goal, a point total seems incongruous. But then there are bulletins posted that change: they describe cruelty and such, suggesting the populace does not turn a blind eye to cruelty in general, only to witches they find guilty. This shows understanding of, well, witch hunts beyond the literal boring stuff.

So much seems on-the-nosee, too. For instance, the introduction at the start. So the writer knows what they are doing, but perhaps they concentrated too much on nailing basics that didn't need to be nailed down fully. And the result is that some events that should have emotional impact don't. Nevertheless, the option of playing to sneak around or get caught provides clear replayability, and I was interested enough to. The translation is adequate, and I know translation work is very hard, even without the attempted Scottish dialogue. But with more rigorous translation, Witchfinders could gain the full flow a story like this needs. As-is, I was interested, and I got through, and there's good craftsmanship. It finished respectably, as I expected. But many things prevented full emotional interest.

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Beythilda the Night Witch, by DCBSupafly

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Quick fun spooky touching poetry, December 27, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

EctoComp does let people run wild with their imaginations or throw something out there they might as well. It certainly helped me say, sure, I can try to write something, why not? Lots of works never succeeded perfectly, but they worked quite well.

Beythilda is such a game, from way back when to just after EctoComp opened itself to non-ADRIFT games. It has some of the tricky guess-the-verb/noun stuff (note: use WINDOW instead of WINDOWS) that ADRIFT games and Speed-IF tend to have, but fortunately there's a WALKTHROUGH command, and on replay I was surprised how well the verbs were clued. Maybe part of that was knowing where to look, or having confidence that I played it years ago, and things eventually fit in.

You, Beythlida, find your familiar Tissues the Rat is missing. But Tissues will be tough to find. There's a mad mob determined to burn you, and they're about to ransack your house. Avoiding them is your first line of duty. The poetry in the descriptions and actions creates an interesting effect. It was written in three hours, so you can't expect a ton of emotion to come through, but it's atmospheric enough. The actions involve typical witch things, though again, reading the descriptions will tell what is useful.

The end puzzle is sort of cute, too, as you put a guard to sleep in surprisingly nonviolent fashion, calling into question how oppressed the mob really is.

This is one game that I shrugged off as "a neat idea or try I guess" when it came out, but it's stuck in my mind and I wish more people would try it. EctoComp or short efforts seem to work well for this so we don't get tired of the poetry, and also so we don't have to put on our pedantic critic's hat.

With twine, a poetry angle has been much more common. The medium is well-suited to it, from rhyming doggerel to free verse. People should take advantage of it. But I hope there'll always be a chunk of the community that would like to throw in a parser game, where either the player or writer is there to explore poetry, perhaps with a special typed command here and there.

I sort of shrugged this game off when I originally played it, but somehow I kept coming back to it. EctoComp has had its share of successfully zany games, but this was an experiment, one that was largely successful. There are side questions of if Tissues was helping you find a new home or just plain scared, and thinking on that and the overall design, I've been through it more times than several (also worthy) entries that excited me more when they came out. We all need a good deal of oddness, especially if it's not forced, and here it is not.

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Lost Coastlines, by William Dooling

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
So many things unexplored, like a dream half-remembered in a good way, December 26, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

LC is way too big for two-hour IFComp's judging frame, but it still belonged there. It's a work of pure imagination and love, and its dreamworld is as interesting as people hope they are when they tell you about the dream they had last night. The map is big, at 17x17, not including the north pole. There's a Prime Meridian which sort of lets you get your bearing. I cursed it occasionally for being so big. The main takeaway is that I knew mapping would be a chore, and I knew ADRIFT allowed UNDO to make things easier, but I was involved enough not to want to. My last act for the two-hour judging period was naming an isle that had no name yet. I cursed myself for not properly curating my own list of weird names from my notes. It was the perfect chance to pick off something I always wanted to use but that couldn't fit into a creative work.

And that's a side effect of LC's dream-world! There are a lot of interesting parts, but so many reminded me of my own weird dreams, waking or sleeping, that I got distracted. Also, it is an investment to get started! You do have to read the instructions to have an idea what to do without extensive trial and error. They're quite good. You may be a bit lost without them, because there's so much you have to decide at once. And the character selection is amusing, well beyond basic dice-rolling stuff. Before entering the dreamworld, you're asked how you fell asleep, what odd item you're carrying, and what class/special talent you have. I restarted after 20 minutes once I had some data on what stats seemed to matter. And the procedural text changed. Bill Clinton, my old bartender, was replaced with Halle Berry. The old map is, well, like a forgotten dream now. I tried to wrap my head around the different currencies. There are several. But at some point it's just best to dive in.

Which is very rewarding. It took me a while to realize that death simply bumps you back to the center, and boy did I spend a lot of time avoiding death. The game has accomodations, though. The documentation, I mentioned. There's an automap, too, and while it's useful for getting started, once the map gets big, it starts to interfere with the text window on the left, so you have to close it. I wound up using Trizbort. I was able to annotate places with interesting or odd stuff. There's a certain sense of frustration combined with wonder as you know the odd place you stumbled on must be useful linked up with somewhere else, but you have no clue, yet.

It's a bit intimidating to guess what to do at first, but the game does put your actions for a particular location in all caps, so guess-the-verb is not a thing. A twist here is that you can perform one such action, but if you try to come back and perform it again, it may destabilize the dream world. Actions include fishing, finding diamonds, visiting shrines, or visiting markets. I had a bit of trouble at first making profit in the markets, because I needed to feed my crew while I was sailing, and I didn't realize that death was relatively harmless, because this was a dream world, after all.

So I sailed in search of, well, I wasn't sure. But that's part of the fun. There was definitely enough to keep me going, through weirdly named locations. I found Las Vegas. There is no shortage of silly humor in Lost Coastlines, and I think it's sort of needed, and it doesn't go overboard, and I'm pretty sure some is specific to the path you chose. Something like finding a friend in your dream, and if you talk to him, he will explain stuff you missed because you fell asleep in class (that's what I chose at the start, for when and where I fell asleep.) This helps break up some of the worries about chance encounters and pretty clearly indicates, yes, there's more fun stuff to look for.

It's not all arbitrary, and LC does a good job of balancing how you come in blank with general guidelines on how successful choices will be. You can't know what's good and what's not, although you're pretty sure, because when you have a choice of actions to perform, the game rates them impossible, difficult, or easy, also helpfully color-coded. I enjoyed looking ahead to when certain choices would no longer be impossible.

For instance, if you walk into a swungle on the first isle (a neat portmanteau, that, much better than jomp,) you can CUT the vegetation or TURN back, and you're told the odds of each succeeding. This isn't a high-risk choice, but as you sail farther, you hit impossible quests, ones you need to build yourself up for. The result of a bad encounter is that you can increase your worry, fury, madness or sadness. These are negative currencies, but you can also accumulate, for instance, knowledge. There are other currencies, and some, you can swap. This is a neat twist on trade routes. Others seem to offer--well, something else. For instance, you can't solve a certain mystery until you have fifty shards of knowledge, and that gets you an important (and cool) sounding special item. On the other hand, too much of any bad-mood stuff is pretty much a virtual death, and you're kicked back to the central port city where you started, which gives you sadness. I'm not fully sure how the moods interact, but I enjoyed having the negative stuff I had to balance, as well as the postiive. Too often in games you wind up getting too much gold and don't have much else to do, or you're worried about super-low hit points. Being stuck with negative stats adds a lot of color.

My fear of game death prevented me from exploring at first, even though I had a save game, and I eventually discovered a small base of merchant isles I could poke around. However, I got a bit frustrated in the Prime Meridian, where it seemed that the map got non-reciprocal. Which, given how big the map was, caused me to put Lost Coastlines aside for a bit. Granted, the Meridian should be weird, as it's marked as significant. I even found a hidden location there based on the nonreciprocal directions! But it took a lot out of me. The scrolling did help with mapping, though, as I wasn't pinned into a corner. But if you're forewarned, this probably won't be so bad.

I still don't really have a handle on Lost Coastlines after two hours. I understand the basic choices and where to stop off and what works, but I still haven't quite tried all options, and I didn't improve my character that much. I'm sad about this, yet hopeful. I suspect once I really nail down a trade route, or some way to keep moving between two locations that boost my stats, things
will get easier. In the meantime, thinking back to it feels like a dream state. One day I'll get the pieces of knowledge to unlock a quest! Or I'll figure a way to make a certain fight beatable. There's so much to do and no clear way to win, which is frustrating if you only have two hours to judge something. So I'll sit back and just remember the oddly-named places I visited, both those useful to my quest and not. I'll remember the thrill of finally mapping that weird central bit, of underpasses on my map (think: a square of islands, with only the kitty-corner ones connected diagonally) and the realizations I had when, oh, these two islands far apart link up!)

LC feels like one of those games you miss a lot but you worry it won't live up to the hype when you get back to it. And I'm frustrated by that, because I did want to play it more. I've seen entries that forced me in to care about a social issue or something. Perhaps it was an issue I already cared about or didn't care about enough, and I felt obliged to go back to it. Whether or not I did, I felt like a bum. But here I'd like to explore the author's dreams and remember my own. I think it's the best ADRIFT game I've played, and it uses ADRIFT's features (the auto map) well enough to reel you in. It's a definite positive advertisement for the author's other work, and given its size, I can see why it took four years to make, and the author was right to follow their vision. I enjoy seeing theirs--but unfortunately, when I'm in the best mood for that, I generally take time and energy to push my own forward. So LC may lose out for my attention, but it was a great reminder to, literally, follow my dreams. The author followed his, and I enjoyed doing so, too. The breaks were mainly to remind me of stuff I'd thought or dreamt. It's definitely exhausting in a whole stretch, but part of me wishes I would, say, make thirty minutes for it per day to see out one big whole dream--and it feels sacrilegious and intrusive to try to disassemble it too soon, but on the other hand, I want to see all the neat stuff the author dropped in there! I think, at the very least, the next time I reconsider playing an old favorite RPG, I will give serious thought as to whether LC might be a more valuable use of my gaming time, because there is so much to explore.

The other option is to stumble on a community of people putting stuff together for a finished general guide, or to notice things you couldn't on your own. The author has expressed a desire to find this or cultivate this. I'd definitely stop by. One can and should dream.

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Am I My Brother's Keeper?, by Nadine Rodriguez

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Terse, compact game about helping (or failing to) a troubled sibling, December 25, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

AIMBK is a relatively short Texture entry that seems a bit too linear to take full advantage of the medium. Nonetheless, the dynamic parts of Texture that don't have you move the mouse around everywhere are effective. You, Sara, have a sister named Sofia. She's been distant her whole life, in and out, and it's not clear what's wrong. The usual, well-trod problem (alcoholism/drug use) isn't the cause, here. Or if it is, it isn't explicitly stated. Unsurprising, as this is a horror game.

So what has gotten her? It's never clear, and that's intentional and more than acceptable. We're left with some ambiguity as to how the supernatural monster chased Sofia, or why. But we're left with the portrait of a narrator who realize they haven't done enough for Sofia, and Sofia has done a lot for them: listening, etc. Sara's provided material comfort for her back, but she can't help her with what's really bothering Sofia. It also seems implied that the narrator doesn't fully realize how Sofia sacrificed mentally to help her. The title itself suggests a feeling of "I've done enough--do I HAVE to do more?"

At least, that's what I'm guessing. I confess I pulled the text from the source, the same as I did for To Persist. And I put things together. I think I enjoyed it more that way. Perhaps this entry would shine more in Twine–as it is, Texture breaks up the flow a lot, though I still got enough out of it. Things got bogged down when turning a page becomes a matter of learning to drag-and-drop from the right place, to the right place. Perhaps this is less of a problem to people more comfortable with Texture.

That said, it's a nice touch to have your answer to the text's question change to a further question when it hovers over the highlighted text it needs to, but the payoff is too little for a story you can't undo, which feels to me like a weakness of Texture. There are three choices at one end, along with a semi-obvious "dud ending" branch early on.

This seems a bit harsh, because clearly AIMBK is well above a "look what I can do, I did something" entry. The writing puts it well above that. There are no Great Evil Proclamations, and I found several interesting revelatory moments. A lot of the ambiguity works. But I don't know if the author used the right tool for the job, and perhaps if they had, I'd have been able to see the author's vision of Sofia's world and trials more cleanly.

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Lost at the market, by Nynym

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Of dreams, music, and playing to the crowd (or not), December 25, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

So, a game in GrueScript! If Robin Johnson isn't in IFComp this year, it's good to see his engine makes an appearance, which is the next best thing. I've been curious about GrueScript for a while–sometimes it feels like it could capture everything I want out of a parser, except maybe for gag commands like XYZZY or SING or profanity to be coyly rejected. I dabbled in USE X ON Y, hoping to make guess-the-verb less of the puzzle, and I may go back to that. But I realize how efficient GrueScript can be!

LatM is a bit of an odd game. There's no real market, officially, and I was waiting for one to show up, but it never did. It's more about your dreams as a musician and how you go about finding them. It felt a bit surreal to me, which given my stuff, I can't complain about, but it took a while to realize surrealism was the intended effect. You just need to find things to rig so that you can escape from various situations, some of which feel very odd. For instance, you are locked in a bathroom, but you have enough tools to make a hole and get out by trial and error. In another place, it turns out you're just in a dream, and you have to find a way to destroy that dream. Orr you talk with an old man who may or may not be your future self before doing something odd and symbolic ... but it makes sense in retrospect.

Your ultimate goal is to make it to a concert, though there are other endings that provide failure. In one, you avoid the stage and open an envelope, and you decide not to go on with things. It feels like the author had some metaphysical recollections they need to include, but they didn't, and they're leaving a bit too much hidden. And unfortunately this seems due to unintentional omissions. There are a couple bugs where you search scenery X and an item appears in the room. But if you search X again, the item reappears, even if it's in your inventory. This is particularly odd with a wardrobe after you've worn your costume to go on stage, which probably isn't the dreamlike effect the author wanted.

There are two ends, one where you give up on your dreams and one where you don't. You have a choice whether to sing a pop song enough. It feels like something the author could've explored more, and on balance, a lot of what seem to be philosophical statements feel a bit overgeneral. Nevertheless, LatM felt complete, though quite possibly the scope of its ambition was cut short by the IFComp deadline. It was a good technical demonstration of what GrueScript can do in the hands of someone other than its creator. I hope we have more.

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Headlights, by Jordan White and Eric Zinda

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A somewhat paint-by-numbers dreamscape in a custom engine, December 25, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

The first two games with the Perplexity engine, Kidney Kwest and Baby on Board, were ... well, a bit different from this. Those were quiet domestic affairs. And while taking your medication for kidney disease is important, the stakes are raised in Headlights. Here, you're out in the wilderness and injured. What are you doing here? And why?

You may be able to guess, especially with the clues the game gives. The detective work is more about just looking around and finding items. The world's a bit surreal. For instance, there's dark liquid dripping from the ceiling of a cave, and when you taste it, it's awful. Guessing the liquid provides a clue. There are also minor puzzles where you need to find a way to make light or gain strength. It feels like standard cartoon or comic book logic, which again is an effective indication you aren't in the real world. But for the most part, you look around and find things based on the room's description, and the verbs you have to guess are very standard.

So it felt technically smooth, much smoother than the previous games. They certainly had their charm, but you had to wait a long time for the next move. You can probably guess what has happened to the mangled deer. Everything's pretty tidy. Though I'm still not convinced that, as-is, the Perplexity engine has any special advantages over a standard Inform parser. I like the drop-down box that appears to fill in a command, e.g at one point, you may try to PUSH BOULDER, which fails, and once you think you can, you can autofill after typing P. That's not related to syntax parsing, and I'm still not big on the debug messages that correct your grammar if you type "PUSH BOULDER" instead of PUSH THE BOULDER. But the tutorial was neat and helpful and the engine appeared faster than I remembered from Kidney Kwest.

The writer does have a good concept of design, but unfortunately the dream world introduces a lot of puzzling for puzzling's sake. If you know the conventions, there's not much to worry about, but the problem is, without much to worry about, the big reveal doesn't have a lot of oomph. It feels like implementing Perplexity for text adventures has overall been positive, and it resulted in a clean, sensible game, but I can't help the chat-style interface worked better in Thanatophobia, and the creativity of both authors (Jordan White and Eric Zinda) would be better served using something that's already there. So far I even think all three of the games would look great in Adventuron (sadly absent from this year's comp.) But it's obvious that progress is being made with Perplexity as a text adventure platform

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The Last Christmas Present, by JG Heithcock

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A well-done holiday treasure hunt for (cliche) the kid in us, December 25, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

(Trivia: with how I scheduled embargoed reviews, the original ETA was December 24, or 6 PM December 23 Central. I got behind, and not having this super-close to Christmas was a reason I considered shifting the chunk of reviews before it to after my review of the #1 entry. But then I figured, since it'd drop on December 29th, it'd be a sort of Last Christmas Present in its own way.)

LCP breaks a cardinal rule of parser games right away, but it does so for the right reasons. Which rule? The one about not forcing the player to examine more than once or use weird verbs or prepositions to search through something more than once. And why? Because you are a kid, excited to get presents, and you will probably look through things a bit carelessly and miss them the first time. (Note: I had trouble the first time figuring this, but then I got what the author was trying to do. This may be worth putting in the hints more directly, but I'm not sure how without spoiling it. Also, I may've missed clues. So technical purists may be upset, but on balance, I think it works well emotionally.)

And I'm not just saying this because games about Christmas presents are hard to hate, even if badly implemented, because who can give a thumbs-down to generosity and togetherness? LCP is well planned out on top of that. It's based on a real-life scavenger hunt which I also assume left all involved quite happy. Its Harry Potter-themed hunt for clues reminded me I disliked Harry Potter even before hearing JK Rowling's hot takes on certain issues. But it also reminded me the good parts of enjoying a story still endure, and of watching a cartoon I liked as a kid and recognizing its shortcomings but realizing they only mattered marginally. Maybe the main character in this story no longer enjoys Harry Potter, and that shouldn't affect their memories, or a player's enjoyment of LCP. It did not for me. It reminded me of things I grew too old for, and how I felt embarrassed at the time and don't any more.

LCP is a scavenger hunt, in a nice big house that isn't too big for a game, and I wound up wondering what the gift was eagerly enough, even though I've long since stopped caring about big gifts. I'm happier with a strategic Black Friday or December 26th bargain purchase, while still hating to see the horridness that is people fighting to be first in line to buy their own. And, yes, the final present is something I don't want to spoil, but it's neat to have that anticipation of what it might be. It's not anything terribly exotic, but it's something I couldn't have gotten as a kid, and that sort of filled a hole, that I was able to share in getting a gift. The end, where you're about to find what your gift is has some semi-obvious foreshadowing that is still exciting for the character, and I felt that through playing, too.

I also liked how the clues popped up. There are two kinds. One, you can ask parents for help--I was amused how this mirrored A Walk Around the Neighborhood, and I wish more games would do this, because you feel less like you are begging for hints. You can feel both worried you are disturbing your family and yet at the same time you want to show them you can figure things out! You also have to find four snitches (side note: I loathe Quidditch and JK Rowling's depictions of sports announcements in her books. It felt nothing like any experiences of sports fandom I know. There are better journalists and bloggers out there. None of this mattered while playing LCP. This may seem like a "oh don't let this bother you, I'm just saying" note, but I was impressed how LCP got me to like things I really should not have, or at least feel kinship with people who liked stuff I didn't) which, together, build a message. I was able to figure what it said after getting two, but I felt sort of guilty to the characters in the story if I'd have just gone and tried things based on what the message was. The puzzles aren't super tricky but don't need to be, and anyway, your family is there to give hints, which is clearly a lot more fun and immersive than poking at a hint menu.

There's a map, too, and sadly that's probably the thorniest of the implementations. Unfolding the flaps and folding them are probably great fun for the character, but for someone using a parser, there's a lot of disambiguation and such, so that's one part of the fun that didn't translate. The map was a pretty big part of the game, so sadly it dented my enjoyment some--but I think something as nice as LCP deserves a mulligan, even if it weren't the author's first game. This feels like a neat post-comp project, if the author is interested.

LCP took what the writer knew and did it very well. And it wasn't just something that's common experience but a unique experience that wasn't too private. I can imagine the main character, and the person the character was based on, maybe not liking Harry Potter any more but still having good memories of that Christmas. It's the sort of entry that should appeal to everyone. If you didn't get around to it during the comp, maybe try it during the holiday season, along with Garry Francis's Santa's Trainee Elf, which I always meant to get to. I'm more motivated now. There are other different Christmas-themed games, too. They may get more stars on IFDB, and they may deserve it. But I'm a bit surprised I've seen nothing like this yet, a more classical Christmas treasure hunt, and I'm glad LCP filled that void.

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The Pool, by Jacob Reux

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Can be scattershot, but what links, links well, December 25, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

I knew this was going to be a horror story when I started, which isn't my thing, so I was pleasantly surprised by the first bit: you have a choice to applaud or not. The lecturer notices whether or not you do. This sort of thing invariably charms me, exposing people's passive-aggressions and leaving you helpless without melodrama, and it bought a lot of good will going forward. Because The Pool does feel a bit chaotic. Part of that is the author's intent–aquatic monsters have been created at a biological research institute, and you will want to figure out why. Oh, and survive, too. It becomes pretty clear that something has gone wrong with the experiment, but it also becomes clear that your definition of "wrong" may be others' of "right." The Pool is also a bit low on polish at the micro level, but I'm impressed with the branches where you can get yourself killed.

I managed to escape, and I felt a genuine relief beyond the trivial snark of "ha ha ha I can move on to the next entry, and that's good, because I'm behind schedule for reviewing everything in IFComp anyway." I'd reached a sort of operational base for my explorations into other branches, and I was interested in not only the ways I could get killed but what they meant. The instadeaths seemed a little less insta. So the organization is impressive. There are a lot of behind-the-scenes moving parts I didn't cop to in my first forays where I did stuff, undid, and looked around. My character felt like a bit of a cipher in the process, someone who wished they could do more, and even at the end where I eventually survived after a lot of trial and error, this didn't seem to be resolved.

This is okay if you're trying to make an AFGNCAAP, but here, you sort of wonder how someone so insignificant and malleable got a job at such a place. This is compounded slightly by going too far to the other extreme with, say, "Ask XXX who would like to attack first, but secretly hope XXX says yes." This is a bit on the nose, and it's not the only one. It does feel like a lot of dialogue could be cut down, and it would've given me endurance to look through even more branches to see the full backstory. Because I'd like to.

The Pool reminded me a lot of early Choose Your Own Adventures but was a heck of a lot darker and didn't have the totally random endings that sometimes got sprinkled in, the sort that seemed like a brilliant reversal when I was twelve but seem totally unrealistic now. There's still the sense of getting shot unexpectedly or dying other ways, and these do make sense the more you explore. So there's general creepiness and intrigue here, and it certainly reminded me of people I thought were my friends, but it turned out they weren't. (Don't worry! Nobody got killed there!)

Sometimes it feels the pace is too much, and the "help bad person X" choices are too scattershot, and it even seems a bit too bland, until you realize something genuinely disturbing is happening in the background, or you get shot, calling the integrity of another character into play. This more than saves The Pool as a solid work to me, and though I recognize it's not perfect, I legitimately enjoyed it, and if parts left me confused, there were bits I was glad to patch up and realized I'd just missed.

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The Alchemist, by Jim MacBrayne (as Older Timer)

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Custom parser, classic fantasy, December 25, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

This is the author's third effort with a custom parser, and if you've played the previous two, you probably have a feel for what it is. The parser is very old-school and attempts to recapture the good bits and cut out the most useless bits. It pretty clearly succeeds. And with each game, Older Timer's work has made technical and creative strides.

But I also saw the potential to hit a wall. It's one I fear I have, too, for what I write, but in a different way. We write about different things. But it's OUR different thing, and we care about it, and we're willing to take a risk that people say "yeah, yeah, I get it" and move on. And we don't try for a huge emotional effect. And I see those sorts of similarities which could be comfortable for those in the know, and a formula that works for enjoyment for the people who like this sort of thing, but then that comfort formula will eventually run out. That time may be a long way away, but it's still there, and it certainly lurks in the back of my mind. However, being able to enjoy efforts like this consistently reminds me that, yes, there are ideas ahead, ones I should work on, even if they pull from previous works, or you realize you've seen that general twist before.

You start off getting a letter from one Ezekiel Throgmeister, who has left you to do your own thing–and if you do it well enough, you'll gain his approval and see many neat things. The ultimate goal is to find a bunch of reagents to make an alchemical spell that, well, completes his experiment. So you know you're getting an adventure game with this all, and if this is not your thing, that's okay. It is mine.

The most entertaining part of the game is a device that renews items. There aren't very many to renew, because even though The Alchemist is long, it doesn't flood you with items. But it's useful in some fun and unusual ways. Alchemy almost feels second to restoring a document or being able to refill a weightlessness or strength elixir endlessly, but then again, if alchemists exists, this is the sort of thing they would ultimately develop. And it's handy in-game, as if you make a mistake with where to use one of your elixirs, you get a small but not insurmountable penalty.

Another focal point of The Alchemist is a mirror that you walk through to visit new weird areas–fantasy staples such as a chapel. You find something new to do there, then move on. It's hard to hate on mirrors that transport you somewhere else, but having this magic contrast with seven-digit codes found on documents laying about didn't fully sit well with me. I wound up more with the feeling of accomplishment I got when I got a microwave or VCR working instead of "hey, I'm exploring a cool fantasy world." Especially since the game has you PRESS 1111111 and then PRESS ENTER–making the magic mirror feel more mechanical and less magical. There are some adherences to old- school parser that don't quite work for me. It's big and involving enough that this sort of busy work drains me a bit. Another nuisance was TAKE ALL/EVERYTHING FROM X, when a one-word verb like, say, CULL would be more convenient. But these are the sorts of things the author sanded down over time.

Sometimes The Alchemist feels a bit color-by-numbers, if you're an experienced player. And if you're not, it won't be for you. But it's fun for all that, and the author has craft. There are no great social insights to be had. It has a relatively low ceiling but also a high floor. It seems that, for non-parser players, just sitting down and going through the walkthrough could help someone familiarize themselves with how parsers work, both strengths and weaknesses. It seems universal but at other times a bit generic, with the various mirror codes. It clearly fell more on the "fun to play" side for me, though. And efforts like this probably will for a while.

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An Alien's Mistaken Impressions of Humanity's Pockets, by Andrew Howe

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
An enjoyable, if done-before, "Humans are weird" diversion, December 25, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

AMIHP is a short and purposeful game about, well, aliens discovering things in humans' pockets and guessing what they're for. It's labeled as a class project in the "about" text, and it does feel like a first work of sorts. But though it's very rough, I liked the humor a lot. Often these are not very successful in IFComp, and this wasn't. I'm not sure they need to be, for students' goals. They are often jumping off the deep end and trying something new. Teams of students have run into headwinds, too, submitting stuff to IFComp. In AMIHP the proofreading is certainly uneven (this may be a case of the author just not knowing where to look for help.) So it had a few strikes against it.

Plus people have probably seen the general conceit before. I was exposed to Horace Miner's "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" back in my freshman year of high school, and it left an impression on me. I know it's been done before, but it's a good template for someone who wants to write something creative without getting too crazy. It's a theme you can riff on without getting burned or seeming too dull. And AMIHP largely does that. There are some minor puzzles, too, such as getting someone to fetch a box or getting by a maintenance person or mixing fizzy drinks in the cafeteria to make an appropriate substrate. The last one felt speculative, but I suppose constant "humans are backwards and odd" riffs might've grated.

There's enough humor and insight in here that I had no problem seeing things to the end. And I'm glad the author didn't beat the joke into the ground. I hope this doesn't come off as "they don't have the talent to go on for an hour," because the story felt wrapped up well, and often I'd like to see more shorter entries that don't feel like they have to transcend everything. You can tick it off and move on and recoup from the bigger ones. I had no problems sticking with AMIHP until the end, despite the distractions with grammar and style. There are about seven locations to visit, so there's not much to hold in your head. I think I'd have been quite happy to write something like on this level in college and to have the opportunity to share it with the world. I wish I'd tried more back then.

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Thanatophobia, by Robert Goodwin

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
ELIZA with higher stakes, December 25, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

Every year I have one author I didn't know with whom I trade a flurry of testing emails. It's exciting. I learn a lot. I wish I'd have started sooner, but on the other hand, I'm glad I had a chance to focus. Thanatophobia (TTP) was such an experience. An innovative interface and seeing my suggestions fixed quickly made me quite happy. As a reviewer, I try to dissociate the enjoyment I had changing works and seeing an IFComp entry under the hood before the big reveal on October 1st from, well, is the work any good? On replaying to actually review it, I think it's still quite good, and I'm glad people reviewed and discussed it despite minor technical hurdles (note: best played on an Opera browser with VPN.)

Now my ideal IFComp entry would be comedy. I do wish IFComp would have more of such entries, where people overcome frustration with coping. Nothing cheesy or prosperity gospel-ish, nor any too-hackneyed "Ha ha ha just deal with it" or outright absurdism for its own sake. But I've always been interested in new and different ways to Deal With It, and a lot of what I write revolves around that, albeit abstractly or weirdly or related to parts of my life I can't share, and if I did, it might not make sense.

Thanatophobia pretty clearly establishes itself quickly as Dealing With Something. But the cheap fun jokes are missing. It's not oppressively dark, or dark for darkness's sake, though. You can guess what's going on pretty quickly. Someone is describing a dream they have. You need to ask them questions. The right ones may push them forward, but it's not necessarily a matter of "hey, look, I can speed-run through with the exact ones." Madeline, the subject of your interrogations, so to speak, gets less vague as you ask more pertinent questions.

As for what you're asking her about? Well, that's something you may guess at with an elementary knowledge of Greek, given the title, but it's not revealed right away. There's a dark figure in the corridor she is dreaming of, but she can't look at her face, only giving small details.

Thanatophobia's natural language parser seems very good and also knows quite a bit of trivia. I just asked about Ren and Stimpy for the heck of it during testing, and she had a non-generic response. TTP's playing a tricky game here, because in order for it to feel real, Madeleine will have to have a response to everything, and a lot of times it is watered down. That can lead to saying oh, why bother, but on the other hand, given that she is vague about other things she needs to be specific about, it works pretty well. You learn when she is being meaningfully vague, and when you should push forward with what you have to say, and when you are just going down a dead end. So it sort of felt like an emotional intelligence test back at me.

How does one pass that test, then? Thanatophobia has three main points, which are revealed in the hints, unobtrusively placed in a pop-out box below the game's main image, which changes when you hit a critical moment. But you and probably figure out pretty clearly when meaningful progress is made. Madeline talks to you about her family, about her friend Kim, and about her friend Kim's family. She reminds you of how you met, and that plays some into what you need to ask about. She wonders why you knew she might have needed you, and you can probably figure out some of the reasons as you go through things. All this doesn't happen right away. I don't know what goes on under the hood, but you slowly start asking about things, and she slowly starts revealing more or saying "But I can't X, can I?" If you get too far off-base, there are nudges back. She notes there's something she's worried about and would like to be asked of. It's much more natural than a quit button or even "Don't leave me now!"

The end was not a huge surprise for me, but that didn't matter. I pretty much knew what had to be done, and I saw through it, and I sort of didn't want it to be true, and I still think I had empathy for Madeline and what she went through. It's certainly an issue we need to address, and in many different ways, especially since, well, I recently saw one of John Oliver's This Week Tonight that addressed the issue: (Spoiler - click to show)it was about how drug gangs in Brazil took more precautions against COVID than the government did, because people being alone is a huge risk factor in drug addiction. You get bored and need something to do, and surely with COVID done, you wouldn't keep at it? So it hit home a bit extra based on what I'd recently experienced, as well as (nothing too dramatic) realizing I was eating more than I should when my athletic club closed for 3+ months back in 2020. I guess I got away with not too much damage, but I did spend too much time playing computer games.

It's tough to provide a new spin on the issues that Thanatophobia raises, but I realized that it may not have been so much about the issues as about getting someone to open up and tell you their secrets, even if you're not the sort of person who looks into secrets. Maybe they had to hide them for a bit, but they need to reveal them to you now. So I felt there was a very good back and forth there, and I think it worked especially well because maybe just you couldn't see the usual parser prompt or whatever, and the use of graphics gave a realistic world that couldn't be too in-depth because of what Madeline needed, in the short term, to hide.

I wound up testing TTP in more iterations than I thought, and not just because I said, hey, maybe this would break things, or the author would get more feedback, or out of a sense of obligation. It provides a useful line of inquiry into certain things that are stigmatized, or into people where we say, how could you be dumb enough to do that? It makes you realize what the real important questions are, without bathos or melodrama or without cloying with too much sympathy. I found it a boost for my IFComp stretch run, both technically (hey! I'm finding stuff!) and also as a reminder of things I'd fought through that I could feel good about, even if they were not as critical as what Madeline saw and experienced.

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Star Tripper, by Sam Ursu

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
The universe: big, cold, hostile, random and ... strategically interesting, December 25, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

There's a lot to explore in Star Tripper, a homage to a sophisticated old phone game, and I don't think two hours was enough to explore it fully. The author knew this, too, but all the same, I was immediately intimidated by starting at sector 99. With a two-hour judging time, my immediate reaction was "oh no, 20 minutes to get acclimated, then maybe one minute to explore each sector?"

That said, it's a well-constructed trading game with a lot of neat bells and whistles, and the procedural generation works. You start with a small ship and look to boost it by learning which planets are where, etc. I found it neat how you could visit a bar and buy drinks and the prices of goods would change, which leads to a lot of game theory based on tracking prices. But the problem from an IFComp setting is that it takes a long time, way more than two hours, to nail things down, and you've already guessed at the strategy, and I was faced with the prospect of, okay, how many sectors do I need to explore before continuing, and how many bars do I need to buy people drinks at? The thing is: you want the game to have surprises, so it doesn't get boring, but with a time limit on playing and an inability to save, you realize you're going to get blindsided. It's fun to get blindsided a bit, of course, but with only two hours, it's impractical.

So I'd like the opportunity to cut out the bit at the start, as the choices don't seem to matter. That might not sit well with the author. The player can just keep rolling for favorable scenarios, e.g. ones with places near the starbase where you start where you can run quick trading routes that don't waste fuel–but on the other hand, you need several tries to really look into things, and it's possible to get bad luck early on, and restarting is frustrating. That and other keyboard shortcuts (beyond being able to hit tab end enter) might go a long way to help people who need to get their feet wet. Also, saving would be nice, especially for a long game. Again, closing a tab inadvertently and not being able to recover was frustrating for me, which on the whole seems more important than preventing save-scumming. I also have some worries, after several replays, that there's a lot of luck involved in finding a good trade route. Getting hit with the same RNG on replay loses a lot of excitement.

So I see there's a lot there, and I'd like to see more, but some of the less important and absorbing features were pushed to the forefront. I'd like to be able to enjoy even more of the cool coding and world-building the author did, but more in the overview sense. Stuff like just being able to buy information quickly after you did so the first time would be a big help (note–sometimes you waste money on beer, because you get thrown out after ordering one drink. I'm okay with that. It's just that sometimes the repetition caused my eyes to glaze over, and I missed vital information.) And then there was the mining sub-game, which was pretty painful on a desktop, even being able to hit TAB a lot.

These are some harsh technical quibbles but I think the author showed they've grown a lot as a game designer and programmer since last IFComp, and shoehorning the game into ChoiceScript is impressive, but ChoiceScript's limitations come through a bit, so it's not as streamlined as it should be. But – in the big picture, I think I see it, and I get it, but I'm too exhausted to look into details. I do, however, wish I'd enjoyed ST's predecessor many years ago, and I feel a sense of loss over that as well as the author requesting ST to be removed from IFComp. ST definitely felt like a bad fit if it wanted to place well, but I'm glad it was there. It does a lot for me technically if not emotionally, though I really would find it most ideal if someone else hacked through to find a win.

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The Staycation, by Maggie H

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Flatmates, can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em, December 25, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

The Staycation listed itself as taking two hours, but for me it wasn't close to that long. However, the time suggestion and content warnings (which seem almost apoligetic) pushed it back in my IFComp backlog. It's more a sprinkling of discomfort than anything intense–a brief Texture effort about spending a few nights at home, or trying to. Claudia and Xavier, your two flatmates, are on vacation for a bit. It's not clear if they're actually dating, or if you are upset about this, but they mention you are welcome to come along. You don't. You're sort of glad they're gone, you say. But then night comes, and you either poke at a book you don't process or a phone, where you see Claudia and Xavier on social media.

There aren't many choices here, but that's part of the intended creepiness. You realize you may not want to be around your flatmates, but you don't want to be away from them, either. The main choice is whether to face your demons inside or not. You have two or three nights of this. My first ending was, apparently, seeing my own blood on my arm and not realizing why or how it happened. Another? Well, it seemed the story got frozen, which was creepy in its own way. You have two options to drag-and-drop, but you have no words to drop them on. The text say "you choose (X)" and the implication is, you can't choose.

I looked at the source, as I wondered if this was intentional.I don't think so, because there's a final ending, where you have a nervous breakdown. Whether or not it is, it's effective enough. I've had times I thought I made a decision and didn't really, because I would flip back and forth. Or I'd choose to face a horrible truth but only after this next go through social media I didn't care about. Perhaps if and when texture becomes more mature, people will know this trick and say it's been done and can we find something new? But I found the jolt effective.

The Staycation mirrored a high-placed game several years ago in IFComp written in Inform that forgot to include an "instead" at the end, and the result was that excessive text bled into the game, but it was surprisingly effective. Here, if the hang was unintentional, it was effective–it gave the prospect of an endless loop of nights, or a fear of an endless loop.

Sadly there isn't enough here. It's a bit light on character sketching, and I think too much is left to the imagination, so it falls short of the well-done cover art. Obviously filling in all the whys would be unsubtle. But there were missed possibilities to play to Texture's strengths by, say, looking at items around your flat.

Side note: this is the first Texture entry I played on my phone, because I looked for ways around the apparent bug and thought it might be the browser. The interface made me wonder if I should revisit my earlier reviews–it makes a big difference!

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Jungle adventure, by Paul Barter

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Very chaotic Python parser game with whimsy to spare, December 24, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

The fears of some about parser games, especially custom parsers, are fully warranted for Jungle Adventure. It has all the usual faults. But it manages to be fun. I like the ASCII graphics, the whimsicality, the not-too-big maze. And, I admit, I enjoyed peeking in the source code. I'm still not good with classes in Python. Paul Barter is much better than me with them. If JA is whimsical (describing your game as "rip roaring" certainly is bold,) his organization is not, and I learned a lot from it. Hats off to him for that!

The game part is chaotic, though. The parser, first. There're simple verbs that outright clash. You don't want to type just "exit." That exits the game without warning. But "exit plane" leaves your plane, which you need to do. Similarly, LOAD GAME and SAVE GAME are necessary, not just LOAD and SAVE. Some items are implicit in the charming ASCII art or the item description, which is clever until something is forgotten, and you're looking for something that's not there. More seriously, you know your radio must have batteries, because it works, but this is not explicitly described in-game. Then the batteries form part of a neat puzzle. And seeing "oh, hey, this is the part of the ASCII drawing that's not in the text" is neat, but it comes at too high of a price.

The game itself isn't too arduous--well, if you cheat a bit. While there's some guess-the-verb or guess the item, once you get a puzzle, items are swapped and you move on. If something is broken, it's pretty clear you must fix it and how. The maze near the end is not too painful, and the main map is not huge. You'll know what to do. A lot of times you may need to get killed to know what to do, but you'll know. There's humor to keep your spirits up as well. Maybe not Mitch Hedberg or George Carlin, but it's there, and it helped me through some parser-wrangling.

So even if the puzzles take on some additional weight due to you missing the right verbs or nouns (pro-tip: read main.py and scenes/*.py in a text editor) and you have to save-and-restore the fights in the maze (if you get killed while button-bashing, you may be kicked out from the "restore or quit" dialogue, too) it's not too bad. As BJ Best said, there's a certain joy of discovery in Jungle Adventure which more advanced games won't have, and we can lose that if we're not careful. That doesn't make up for serious technical flaws, but for those of us who like writing or playing parser games, it heartens us to try neat new stuff and take on a bit more than we might have felt comfortable with before.

Too many JA style games in IFComp and we might have less patience with the parser. But for me a small handful is always nice, as they never seem to deal with heavy issues, and too often I do not want to deal with heavy issues, even if such efforts are well-written. With JA, there's that genuine joy that, gosh, you can DO something like this, and it succeeds at its goal. And to me it's clear these games are better than they were five or ten years ago, where we have to dig deep to find what the writer was saying, and it's a bit unsatisfactory. JA has a walkthrough now, so IFComp completionists, if you're out there, will hopefully be able to enjoy things more easily. There are frustrations, and a lot of them, but they're (relatively) forgivable. So if you are an IFComp completionist late to the show, you can notice and understand the holes in JA and not feel impeded by them, and the fun I suspect the author had putting JA together will be far less filtered.

Perhaps for a sequel, in addition to a more robust parser, the author will use the colorama package which allows a programmer to specify text color. Then, maybe, the important items could have color in them, while the background is just background. Colorama's something neat I use for my own Python programs to tell when stuff goes wrong, or when a test passes. I think JA shows a lot of potential. With the author's knowledge of Python (I imagine this could expand to learning a testing module as well,) a game design book or two could make something really special, whether for IFComp or elsewhere.

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Traveller's Log, by Null Sandez

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Monster grinding in Python, parser version, December 24, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

Python? Well, it feels like Python has possibilities for a simple-stupid parser that people can figure easily. With its "split" function (divides a string into an array with spaces) and so forth, it avoids the pitfalls of a lot of homebrew parsers in C or whatever. You see the verb, and you see the object, and you know what to do with each. You don't have to worry about Inform's custom verbs. (And hey, I wrote one last year because it fit what I was trying to do. Someone pointed out JavaScript would've worked better. They were right. But I don't know JavaScript.) With my own Inform games, Python might work better, because I really abuse the regex matching, which slows Inform. The potential is there. Unfortunately, Traveller's Log (TL) doesn't do much with parsing or plot.

It's a relatively small Python game. It's a bit confusing at first in that it asks if you want to read a file, and either way, it then asks for a 3-digit code, which affects what you start as. Looking at the source, there are several options, and I only wish we'd had some nudges as to how to start. I don't mind the randomization per se, but I was flying a bit blind. Perhaps on ending, if I were given some clues how to proceed and replay, I could and would.

You're given commands to type (e.g. walk, trade, exit or warp) with the goals of either gain money to live comfortably or find a king to ally with to live happily. There are some fights, but nothing too stressful, as dying resurrects you quickly. You also get random gold for staying at inns which pop up randomly, which is counterintuitive. The main goal is just to TRADE enough for the best weapons, then kill enemies as needed.

The writing and mechanics are don't have much to distinguish them. The game's title feels a bit generic. It's technically sound in terms of gameplay, though I'd have liked "y" and "yes" to be synonyms along with "n" and "no." Nevertheless, there's a good deal of effort put into the entry, as I can see from all the possible characters you could play as, and I enjoyed looking at the source because I tend to skimp on programming classes, and after some play time, I had a much better feel for them. They're something I've used more and more as I try to to script-testing of my Inform games, and I had a few aha moments.

It's good to see people are trying to use Python. There was one game in particular I meant to look at from 2016 that also placed last, though Chandler Groover said "Hey, there's a lot here." And there are advantages to Python--less worry about failing to implement default verbs and so forth. Everything is laid out well enough in Traveller's Log, but there's not much to do and not much reward for the grind, so it misses the mark. I'd like to see more Python efforts. TL doesn't do anything to change my views on this, from a functional perspective, even if the story and imagination are lacking.

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The Absence of Miriam Lane, by Abigail Corfman

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Coming out of the shadows, but nothing supernatural, December 23, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

A woman has vanished, well, sort of. Her husband's a bit confused. There's no foul play, really. You're a researcher, maybe an investigator, maybe a combination. That's an early choice, but your title doesn't matter. Your task is to find out what has happened, where did she go, and why.

Everything seems in order in not just the house by also the story and the technical layout. The layout feels appropriate–black and white sketched pictures, unintrusive but effective music, and a small local map in the bottom left where you click on where to go. So big-picture navigation is easy. The calculated sparseness gives us a good feeling that something is wrong. We're seeing enough details, right? But we aren't.

Asking her husband gives you additional questions to ask in general. Some things seem out of place. The light is wrong. You can have up to five questions to ask, and the right one in the right place offers clues, leaving Miriam Lane closer to visible. Ones you don't need any more are discarded. While brute force works, things are generally well-clued, and you should be able to find some clear places to ask the right questions before the last observation or two needs guesswork.

Once you become adjusted to the light, you have an idea of how or why she is gone. Here there's the only thing that really broke immersion for me, but the rest of the game is so well-done, I may be missing something: you-the- character need to find her name, which her husband never tells you, but you-the-player know it's Miriam, and based on the puzzles in the rest of the game, "M. Lane" would seem suitable. It's minor, but the rest of the game is so strong, I want to leave the possibility open I was missing something.

Once she's visible, you can start collecting items. Some of them have special meaning to her, for better or for worse. An average reader should discern pretty easily what makes her happy and what doesn't. Also, the stuff that makes her happy is hidden, and most hidden items are similar to something unhappy in clear view, and yes, this Means Something. The more positive items you collect and show her, the more optimistic the ending is, though once you know her name, describing what you've found of her also helps her return to her normal self. This threw me off slightly, too. There was a status bar at the bottom, and it increased when you gave her something nice, but I was under the impression you had to make it go all the way. You don't. But perhaps I should have known.

You see, there's a moment in AoML where it clicks that the author knows what they're doing. This is the only other time AoML slightly broke immersion for me, and that was more due to me appreciating the technical and design work, because I was looking for it when writing a review. There's a book of flowers and a flower bed. The book describes several flowers. Each flower has about five descriptions. When you pick a flower, you're asked to choose from about twenty descriptions. But you don't need all five! I can't recall this convenience before and, well, it just makes sense.

This was an immense relief but also in line with the game: you don't need to know every detail about why things happened to Miriam, or how she got to be the way she is. Although in some cases, items you find may make her upset. Several that seem happy aren't, which you can deduce if you have been paying attention, thus putting AoML that much further above your average fetch-quest. That's how empathy works in general, beyond an "oh, you like this, right? Well, you seemed to enjoy it. Whatever." Miriam doesn't need that complete understanding, yet you feel she needs it, and her husband seems to want a complete explanation. None is necessary from her, and none is necessary in-game. So when we ask for people to understand us completely, perhaps we would really just be happy with people who understood enough to block out others who tell us, with bad intentions or not, "Gosh, I just can't understand this about you." For Miriam, it's her husband not really caring about her impractical or "childish" desires and ignoring her sacrifices. While that may be a truism, AoML pushes it forward nicely.

There's one more criticism that's quite high-level. I'd like it to be easier to tab through the options. There's a lot of mouse movement, and certainly AoML is more ambitious and intricate than your average Twine effort, so there needs to be, with pop-up screens when you want to think or take an item. This is detailed GUI stuff, and it's the sort of request I only make when it's clear the author knows what they're doing and then some and, well, I wanted to see everything in-game before rifling through the source. I think with something as high-level as AoML is, it leaves you asking for more--especially because the main NPC, Miriam, never did, and look what happened to her! That's what being sympathetic gets you, game.

This is minor, though. AoML offers a wide variety of emotions and choices. You can play very badly or well. The second time through, when I knew there were things to be remembered (the more you remember and find, the more you recover of Miriam) I felt bad forgetting stuff I should have known. It occurred to me that there were people I found forgettable whom I cared about more than noisier people who grabbed my attention, and perhaps I was on the other side of that.

One more thing: AoML made more than enough sense the first time through, but it made a lot more sense when I replayed the introduction and poked around and also re-read the content warning. So much is well-hinted. It leaves you feeling you missed something, and that is your fault and not its, and that's an eerie feeling. I wound up remembering times I'd been ignored in my past, as well as people I ignored. There was no rage. But I remembered certain items people felt should give me joy and didn't, and I had an explanation. So that was a boost.

AoML and Elvish for Good-Bye were my top two rated entries in IFComp and may be more similar than you think. Both talk of unspoken desires. In AoML, they're more realistic, stuff you can't say you want, or stuff that can be easily crushed. EfG is more fantastic, more optimistic, a knowing there's something out there you can't imagine one day. Each feels necessary to give life color in its own way.

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Trouble in Sector 471, by Arthur DiBianca

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
I, Robot Handyman, December 22, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

With the author's games, you have stuff you know you should expect and a whole bunch you don't, and both are pleasing. You know you're going to have a lot of whimsy, and some puzzles that should be basic but aren't, but they are fair. And you have limited verbs that say, okay, this is the puzzle. You'll have to combine them in some ways, and there aren't many commands, but there are enough that brute force just isn't going to happen. So come use process of elimination and a bit of intuition and solve it.

The subject matter is something else entirely. There will be something new, nothing you have to think too much about. That's saved for the puzzles. Here you're a robot in some high-tech area that's out of power. I assumed it was a spaceship, maybe because of "Sector (HIGH NUMBER,)" but the author noted that nothing made this the case in the text. He is correct.

Your official name is Exter-17, and you'd better do a good job here, or you'll be relegated to the boring stuff. You only have a few commands (COM to communicate and ZAP to zap) to start. The main spaceship doors are all shut, and without power, they're not going up. And all the other robots are out of power, so ZAP it is. This one's hard to bungle, and that's how introductory puzzles should be.

As power comes back on, you gain another abillity/command. You can interact with crystals, which (among other things) open doors. You'll gain a few more commands, so you can even be able to pick up items you find lying around, eventually! This is of course an amusing inversion of how TAKE is one of the first commands a player learns or uses, and TAKE ALL is an accepted early way to get your bearings. I won't spoil the actual command names, because they're nice small amusing surprises, as are the robot name abbreviations of the NPCs. These presented small puzzles to figure out (what do the first three or four letters expand to?) when I got stuck with the main puzzles. This is totally optional, of course, but it helps prevent you from feeling dumb or frustrated.

This all feels very simple, like learning very basic machine language commands (as with many DiBianca games) but there are production effects, as well. The first is what happens with text art that happens with power back on. I won't spoil it, but if you play for five minutes, you can't miss it. You also have an option of which background to choose, so that's very cool. I ran through all the options more than once.

Restoring power is the easy part. Destroying bugs is next, and it's tougher. Well, the first bug is out in the open. Then the next two are in rooms you need to solve relatively trivial puzzles to gain access to. Then, if you try to ZAP a bug, it evades you! There are thirteen total, and while no puzzle is too complex, you have to pay attention to your surroundings, or to rooms that seem like dead ends. Pretty much everything is useful, and you have to figure how.

You can win without exploring all the rooms in S471. This is a DiBianca staple: enough challenges to make you happy you got through it, then a hint you're missing something. In this case, there are a few rooms in the center that are unexplored. It seems two squares are pretty obviously needed to preserve symmetry. You get a small bonus on killing the last bug, and it's up to you how to use it that to poke around even more. Given the square map, you can figure where you need to look. There are also locked doors, or ones that won't stay open. There's even a robot that imitates you around a locked door, so toggling the door is out.

I enjoyed Sector 471 a lot. While I don't like rating it as opposed to other games by the author, I just would like to compare it to books of brain teasers as a kid, mathematical or otherwise. DiBianca's stuff seems to last a bit better. With the books, at first it was fun to say "Hey! I know how to do that!" but they got less fun when I knew all the tricks and realized I was only getting answers from what I already knew. I felt ripped off. I hoped for more out there. And I wanted more than problems. For instance, it's fun to solve "Two mathematicians were talking. One said the product of his kids' ages was 36. Then he told the other mathematician the sum of his kids' ages. It wasn't enough for the other one to decide their ages. Then he mentioned his oldest just had a birthday." It's fun to work through again after you've forgotten it for a while. But it is such a bummer when reading a puzzle book and getting a bunch of these not-new puzzles but you're aware these are rehashes. And I still remember the day I realized logic puzzles didn't have the satisfaction they used to, and I was probably avoiding mistakes more than trying or enjoying anything new. With the author's complete works, I don't feel that way.

S471 definitely has its own personality, and the general brevity works well -- the robot dialogue is odd and whimsical the right way, because robots shouldn't talk much like humans, and you can and should have a good laugh about it. It continues a nice string of works I'd have enjoyed as a kid, ones that would've boosted my confidence when the Zorks, no matter how much I loved them, left me baffled. As much as I enjoyed abstract problems, I wanted more, and I didn't know what. (I preferred this stuff to dirty jokes at 13, which did not make me at all popular.) These tastes feel less weird now I've played many such games and know others like to, too. While I don't need them any more, and the Internet provides other ways to explore my mind, I'm glad there's a repository for neat puzzles consistently blended with a fun story.

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The Only Possible Prom Dress, by Jim Aikin

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Lost in a mall--it's more fun when you're an adult!, December 21, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

Big picture stuff first: PPD (I'll neglect the O, as otherwise I'm reminded of Naughty by Nature's hit which seems, um, incongruous with the title) makes me want to play Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina. It's maybe on the long side, slightly, to fit into my plans, and I'd have missed it outside of IFComp. I admit I appreciated the walkthrough greatly. I don't know how much I can kvetch about tricky puzzles, or even if I have an ethos of one, but it's the sort of thing I wish I have bandwidth for, even if I don't. Still, it's a lot of fun, with a lot of variety, and it's old-school in many ways. I mean, malls are dying, and it's extremely expansive, and you need a big map. There's a big word puzzle, too. I'd have absolutely loved it back in the Infocom days, before there were so many other games to grab my attention. I've had paid for the InvisiClues. Thankfully, during IFComp, I needed to buy neither PPD or its cluebook. Technology!

PPD is the story of a woman who wants to get her daughter the perfect prom dress. It tackles no great social issues (okay, there's a bad rich person who gets comeuppance, and we can never have too many of that.) But it's not just pure entertainment, as there's some nice family stuff in there. Your daughter sends slightly pleading texts that double as shallow hints, and one of the main puzzles includes a love story on its own. There are absurdist laughs along the way and a bit of criminal mischief. You lock someone in a closet, but it's revenge, because what they did violated a memory of something nice from Ballerina. You may have started them smoking again, too, though they likely didn't have the discipline to stay away) and I do enjoy the cringey puns in the store names.

I hope my review gives you a big-picture idea of what was a fun experience for me, even though I abridged it. This is a game where even looking at the walkthrough will make you laugh. But sometimes we don't have the time. Compared to other long efforts, I got a lot more. This has obviously been planned and tested well. And the author admits they don't expect anyone to solve it within the IFComp time limits. They hope it will last. Perhaps it's a great game for when it's cold outside and your Internet is flaky.

A word on malls. Even a closed mall brings back memories for me. Malls were bigger when I was a kid--part of it was, I was smaller, so they seemed bigger. There was a mix of awe and fear, and I figured the future held even wider and taller shopping malls, because everything would be bigger and better in the future! They amazed me–all the stores I wanted to look in but parents wouldn't let me, because we wouldn't buy anything. Then, of course, malls started closing, and I realized I never had a look in store X. Sometimes I still see a store name today where I wonder "what did they sell?" (Thanks for answering, Google!) And I feel like I'm doing the next best thing to sneaking away from my parents looking in. PPD captures that sense of being lost in a way a swashbuckler can't, but not really, because if a mall were an actual maze, it would be very, very bad for business. It has to be practically laid out, and there are no dungeon rooms or whatever (government regulations!) but there's still a chance for hijinx. And though I've been in few malls with elevators (Schaumburg, Water Tower Place--they're there for aesthetic value,) just having that elevator in PPD helped me imagine an impossible mall, or one I expected would be build by now and wasn't. It turns out, there's some reason why the mall and its elevator are laid out the way they are, too. Nice planning by the architect.

As for the puzzles? I thought the item-based ones were the strongest, and the more abstract ones felt forced. In one, you push a bunch of buttons in a certain order to cause security screens to go blank. This is neat on its own, but picturing the security guards you suckered away from it actually figuring out how to operate this seemed far-fetched. If they could, they'd have a much better job than security guard. Perhaps I'm a stickler for this, given the puzzles I like to write. I can't express my full theories, but sometimes an abstract puzzle at the wrong time feels like it's just there, and here it can break up the relative fun of doing odd things with everyday items.

These puzzles make for a very pleasant escapism, and when you do punk an NPC, there's that brief moment of worry PPD's going to get mean, then it doesn't. It could really have gone wrong with the homeless man (he seems to have delusions, but he doesn't,) but you actually enjoy some significant cooperation. And there's general retro mischief like smoking indoors, which we wouldn't tolerate today! It's not full retro, though, as a cell phone you have provides you with occasional love-bombs from a well-meaning daughter and also the ability to take photographs. I remember reading how so many horror plots from years past could've been subverted if even one person in a party had had a working phone, but here it's not possible. OPPD has the phone, but you never need to use it, and in fact you probably want less technology.

PPD also does well enough keeping the relevant focus areas small. You eventually need to distract the security guards, but until you do, they have movie cameras centered on most stores. You have a catch-all for unnecessary items, and the various stores with their crazy names (bad pun alert! Of course, I was sad when the bad puns were over) are emptied quickly enough. So OPPD is comfortable despite its intimidating size. It doesn't make any great philosophical statements, but I'm often glad when a work doesn't state that up front, and I don't think they all should need to.

I can see myself going through PPD with a walkthrough before I play through Ballerina. Jim Aikin is one author I'd always managed to look into, and I just haven't found the right excuse, yet. It really is a fun, long story, and although I ran out of energy because I had other comp games I wanted to look at, I enjoyed getting turned around a bit and having that sense of wonder I felt so long ago, when Internet one-click shopping made everything easier.

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A Chinese Room, by Milo van Mesdag

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
The Ethics of Oppression, or at least the Optics: a review of half of the game, December 20, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

I feel like I failed to a certain extent getting through this and trying to evaluate it. There's a lot to grasp, but on the bright side, what I was able to grasp lasted. I'm just finding it hard to build the courage to try again. You see, it's a two-player game, and I only played one side, which gave me so much to think about. I may choose to update this later once I've gotten through both sides. But this is enough. So I hope this is, at least, an endorsement even just to play on one side.

I played as the officer in an army that was occupying a much smaller country. My father was a prominent oligarch, but somehow I'd never made as much of my family connections as I should have. But I had a position of some authority, of breaking up fights between privates, and so forth. There was a good deal of pushing them around as I kept them in line. I guess that's war, whether you're the good guys or bad guys. It reached a new level because I had something called the Throne that I put prisoners of war in. The Throne couldn't read minds, but it did know what questions to ask. Which, ostensibly made my job easier, except it sort of didn't. I-the-player realized I-the-character would be responsible for my actions and judged in the same way. So I sort of hedged. How much should I let prisoners go? I'd say, from my own chair where war is assuredly bad but at least not happening to me, "Well, of course I'd let them go." But on the other hand, I wondered how much my decisions would reflect of my playing partner. Would they wonder what the heck I was doing? Would I ruin the experience for them? Would I be too self-contradictory? And this was well apart from even the human considerations! Certainly there are some oppressors we wish we could put in a throne, but of course, oppressors being oppressors, they'd seize access to the throne and use it.

And that's what happened here. And I-the-player wound up sympathizing very much with the people in the thrones. I enjoyed their arguments to try to get out of the AI style questioning, and it reminded me of stuff I wished to say when I was being interrogated (nothing warlike, of course! Just entitled jerks! Now's not the time for details, much as I want to spill them.) But being able to rebel and speak out like that, well, I like examples like that, wherever I can find it, so I wound up wanting to see more of how they defied me and the Throne AI. Each such session seemed woven in with some happenings in the barracks where fellow soldiers had beefs. It often seemed my character was madder at his cohorts than with the people he captured. Or maybe I was just more interested in the dissident writer and his crazy-sounding books I'd totally have read. Or maybe I was just remembering all the times I'd been interrogated by someone who was just looking out for my own good, you know, and if they didn't get to interrogate me, someone meaner would years down the road, and I wouldn't be prepared. It sure as heck felt like they had a Throne to put me in so they'd ask just the right question to drive me semi-crazy. (That wasn't the case. It just felt this way. And people know how to play tricks. So the thought of something being REALLY accurate and asking the questions I really fear does, in fact, scare me as no amount of blood could.)

I found myself hedging a lot to the authorities I figured were in the game–I had a feeling they would strike me down as wrong no matter what I said. Many thoughts went through my mind, from "hey I respect this guy" to "oh god he'll just get captured anyway and probably killed, maybe I should keep him for his own good." Where of course his own good wasn't very good.

I sat back and wondered what power the other person had over me, if they had any at all, waiting for punishment that never quite came, beyond frequent debriefings by my direct superior. I suspected anything I did would not be good enough. ACR wouldn't be the first game to pull this trick, but being on both ends of someone being told they are not good enough is harrowing, and I remembered times where someone said that to me and probably had someone above them saying the same thing. I found it hard to have sympathy for them. I still do, even after my experience with ACR, but I see the whys and hows a bit more clearly now.

This is a lot, yet I walked away from ACR pretty sure I missed a big chunk of what it was about. The verbal sparring with the prisoners interested me immensely, and the big themes, not so much. I'd meant to play through as Caroline, but I couldn't help but feel I'd been lucky enough to choose the side that interested me more. It made me think about things entirely unrelated to war, but to persuasion and manipulation in general.

It was uniquely disturbing to me, not in the "look at all my content warnings" sort of way, but in that I was put in a position to make really sticky decisions I did not want to, and in this I think it was superior to Alexisgrad, the author's entry from last year, where so much seemed a foregone conclusion. I felt trapped here, but the tough questions and issues felt more personalized. The prisoners felt more real than the Dictator, and the privates I had to keep in line felt more real than the higher-ranking generals. There were big ideas in each work, but I felt like I could access them a bit more, so I feel more than okay acknowledging I must've missed a heck of a lot, and I think I need a lot of help from other reviewers to ask the sort of questions that ACR wants me to ask, if I really want to get the full experience. Because it does seem to want the reader to ask them, without forcing anything, and they are important questions without being drenched in importancy.

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Esther's, by Brad Buchanan and Alleson Buchanan

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
"clueless human finally understands mice", December 19, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

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.

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A Walk Around the Neighborhood, by Leo Weinreb

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Least messy "my messy apartment" ever!, December 19, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

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.

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Admiration Point, by Rachel Helps

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Workplace crushes and their discontents, December 18, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

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.

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Lazy Wizard's Guide, by Lenard Gunda

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Definitely not a lazy custom parser, December 17, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

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.

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No One Else Is Doing This, by Lauren O'Donoghue

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A night's frustrating activism, in 15 minutes, December 17, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

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.

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Let Them Eat Cake, by Alicia Morote

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
fake-picturesque and entertaining story with many endings, but ..., December 16, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

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.

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Elvish for Goodbye, by David Gürçay-Morris

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Imagination and loss. I feel almost unworthy., December 15, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

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.

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Who Shot Gum E. Bear?, by Damon L. Wakes

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
All the twisted amusement the cover art promises!, December 13, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

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!

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You May Not Escape!, by Charm Cochran

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Just a Maze, except, well, it clearly isn't, December 13, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

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.

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i wish you were dead., by Sofía Abarca

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Sharp dialogue and psychological tension trumps timed text, November 29, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

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.

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U.S. Route 160, by Sangita V Nuli

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A brief slice of running away, November 27, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

We've all had those involuntary moments where maybe we misunderstood or misread a work, but it was powerful to us in some way. That happened here with R160. You open your eyes in the hospital and the text says SHE'S HERE. I thought it was the narrator's mother, one of two main antagonists. But it was actually the person you loved. It shook me. This was a high point for me in IFComp and R160 as well. It's deserved, even if R160 doesn't soar. It reminded me of old fears and how I'm at least glad some of them didn't come true. Some remain. They're nothing as harrowing as escaping from a preacher you don't love, whom you're engaged to. Not only that, but you don't like men, period, which is another strike against you.

So it's a cliche we're all running from something. And driving's a good way to do it. I remember driving around through some curves in college, curves a friend three years younger than me told me about. It felt like I was dekeing some problems or other, or I hoped I was. I soon realized I wasn't. My problems weren't as serious as the main character's. But we had similar abstract concepts we were running from. "Be grateful for what you have, you barely deserve it" guilt trips. It reminds me of my fears of marriage, too. There are all sorts of jokes about picking the wrong person, but I found it easy to picture that a spouse would either be not right for me, or for my family or, as a horrible compromise, nobody. Of course, along the way, I chose bad friends, not to be rebellious, but just, well, I was used to certain things, and there were certain faults I felt I should be able to forgive.

These days there are more late-night bike rides or walks or even visiting the athletic club, too, about this sort of thing, but they're not as intense, and often it's about getting ideas. But R160 brought back some of the thornier bits I'm able to deal with now.

These days the driving around curves is replaced with late night bike rides or walks where I can reflect on things that don't bother me any more and
problems worth bouncing in my head. There are always writing notes to type into my computer when I get back. But certainly the fears in R160 have loomed in different contexts.

The plot itself can be oversimplified into continuing your flight or returning home or stopping for a break. If put that plainly, there wouldn't be much there, but based on the scenery you choose to concentrate on, different memories pop up. And with them, we don't get much of a view of the groom, but what there is, it's hard to like. The main character is obviously escaping more than heteronormativity. That's a word I hate, and I wish there was something shorter, but maybe such a concept deserves to sound ugly. She realizes her fiancee sees her as an accessory, too, and not even one particularly to be proud of. Someone convenient, maybe even a trophy. Her mother does, too. The narrator's being pulled into a life of apparent relative ease, certainly better physically than she's told she deserves. Based on the brief character sketch, I imagined the fiance cheating on her and blaming her or, at the very least, lying to her in the name of the Lord. Whether or not he knew she was not attracted to men. It didn't matter. There's ambiguity why he chose her, which seems intentional. The possibilities are disturbing both ways. That's how it is, fearing someone with power.

I suppose I'm a sucker for lines like "He argues with you about your withdrawn silence. / It's ironic that he never lets you get a word in." because they describe so much more than romantic failures. The sort of thing it took me too long to realize, and once I did realize it, I wondered if I was being snarky or ungrateful or nitpicky. This was more effective to me than the poetry, where the author resorted to super-short sentences once too often, which broke up some good observations.

There are three endings without a whole lot of branching, and there's no appreciable puzzle-solving, but here, there probably shouldn't be. You're making impulsive choices, but they are based on the characters' neglected fears and desires. Not even the best ending is fully happy, but each in its way dealt with non-romantic fears I had and even have. Maybe I was ready to laugh at the own weirdness from my life--like how my parents loathed fundamentalists, but don't go listening to that heavy metal music just in case there were Satanic lyrics. (It was too loud, anyway.) Or how elder family members had reservations about the Wisconsin (or was it the Missouri) Lutheran Synod. Eventually, my parents divorced and remarried non-Lutherans. My sister's husband is Jewish. This wasn't truly funny until I heard Emo Phillips's canonical joke on religion. (It's best in his voice, but it's good on paper, even/especially if you see where it's going!)

It wasn't just about religion, either. I picked the wrong college sports team in my adolescence: Purdue, where we used to live) and not Northwestern, the smart kids' school. Not quite picking a life mate, but not something you should have to justify to anyone, and I did. Peers and teachers found it odd. Others at school were upset I quit an extracurricular activity because I felt I didn't belong. They played the "it's the best you can do, really" and "what are you looking for, anyway?" angle. I felt like a bottom feeder in them, then felt lost away from them. It definitely depicts a moralistic community without being moralistic, and that certainly gave me space to consider far less drastic things than a failed marriage, and I never felt the story saying "You think you were lost? Look at the protagonist!"

If you want a robust story, US ROUTE 180 might not be the work for you, and the poetry didn't work well, either, but the core but it was remarkably effective at reminding me of some horrors I escaped, and which frustrations mattered and which didn't, and other ways I even compromised saying, well, I've found enough of myself, and that's enough, right? Some might find US Route 180 a bit too overgeneral, and I can see that. But it hit a sweet spot for this never-married, never-engaged person.

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To Persist/Exist/Endure, Press 1, by Anthony O

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
The real happiness was the game design choices I noticed on the way, November 26, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

I remember being proud of myself for learning how to deal with long wait times on the phone. It was a bit annoying, sure, but I had things to do. I would plan out, for instance, cleaning out browser tabs or whatever, or maybe even tinkering with a particularly tricky script. Or I cleaned off my desk or, if the phone cord reached that far (back when all phones had cords,) the fridge or sink or whatever. It's changed over the years. But the important thing is, I have something to do, and I've gotten over the boredom and fear and so forth. There are some worries that I will get distracted and maybe even put the phone down, and that is exactly when the hold musical breaks, and the operator will say "Is anybody there?" and then hang up when they don't hear me.

Now I don't particularly deserve an award for this trivial bit of adulting. The cheesy line is that finding something to do to fill in that spare time is reward enough. I've even managed to find gethuman.com to save me a bit, too. I kind of had an ethical dilemma with that one: I was sort of lying to get to the head of the line, but geez, maybe everyone was doing it. Technology has taken care of these fears, or ways to lessen them, but I still remember them, and they resurface when my internet connection is down.

The protagonist of TPEEP has no such chance to grow or reflect or blow off inconveniences. They're not calling about that charge on their credit card that still doesn't belong there, but they can afford it. They aren't even calling to switch to online bill payments or to activate a gift card. No, their needs are much more basic: to jump from despair to happiness as quickly as possible. Who knows if they are asking for permanent or just temporary happiness? It doesn't matter, really. It's pretty obvious early on they won't get it. They have no chance. And they don't even have the thrill of the chase from more traditional stories. And perhaps they don't really believe they really deserve happiness, even if they hope the quick jump is there. The end result? You-the-character can wait a few turns, but you will have no choice but to hang up eventually.

There's not much text in the game, but I don't think there needs to be. It probably doesn't want to force the point home, but we get it, nonetheless. The options on the phone are not for customer service but for different types of happiness. Soon they diverge into how to avoid sadness. Of course, there is nothing to be done. That's the point. And I found it much more effective than more visceral tales of depression. You half get your hopes up, because you know not to get them all the way up, but all the same, it's still too much. It's like trying to get your money back from a casino. TPEEP has no sound, but I can still a fake-cheery voice rattling off the options. You know that it's blowing you off, and it's ostensibly speaking clearly and slowly so you understand things, but really it's just so that people will get bored and hang up, so the company has to hire fewer operators.

This is in the name of company profits. When the character calls the happiness conglomerate, well, you'd expect happy people would want others to be happy. Maybe that is true. Maybe the people who seem happy are as clueless as those who know they aren't. Maybe they're just saying they're happy to fool themselves and have nothing to say beyond "turn that frown upside-down."

Ironically, this lack of getting anywhere close to happiness in the entry provided me with a certain amount of happiness, reminding me how I'd at least avoided hitting some pitfalls repeatedly. I remembered the times I found happiness when I failed to get excitement, as well as good replies I discovered to bossy older people telling me "You can't be happy all the time, deal with it." (Protip: it's okay to be sick of barriers to happiness thrown in your way arbitrarily.) I suppose I wanted some agency to be able to deal with a big pitfall. Here the narrator has none.

A word about the interface: at first it annoyed me. You click on a verb at the bottom, and several nouns change color. You can drag and drop each verb over them. This was awkward for me at first and I felt, cynically, I'm glad this entry is short, or I would make it short. The repetition even after a few times was exhausting (part of that was the hour I played through) but then when you no longer had a choice, it felt worse. But then I got used to it after playing a few other Texture games, and on my phone and not just my desktop, which made me happy in a way that hammering away at one single Texture entry could not.

Entries like this remind me of the old Yiddish joke "Waiter! Such lousy food!" / "Yes, and such small portions!" which can be hard to pull off without, well, actually annoying the reader/player. Not that TPEEP is lousy, but it's about lousiness, and balancing that feeling or joke or whatever ("I give up" feelings without making the player give up) is tricky. But I think it works here. Though it does feel like the cleverness of being able to drop a verb over more than one noun wasn't used to its fullest, and one of the main mechanics is, after a few times, removing wait/give up choices for giving up.

TPEEP gave me a lot to think about for an allegedly short game. I'm comfortable in that wheelhouse, not needing a whole lot of physical details and feeling okay stepping away from something to come back to it. In this case, I stepped away from TPEEP and got some personal insights in the meantime. It felt, in a way, like I was sticking it to TPEEP's unresponsive in-game automated phone support, or phone support from my past, whether it sent me in a circle or cut me off outright. And in this case, I was amused that a game ostensibly about wasting a chunk of 15 minutes for me-the-character felt like just the opposite for me-the-player.

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Glimmer, by Katie Benson

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
"checking up on people" simulator, November 26, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

I've seen the author's works before and always meant to get around to the stuff of hers I hadn't looked at. I'd like to see more of them, and I have to admit I'd also like to see more of this. It's a positive but short game about feeling socially trapped, which unfortunately has been a pretty big thing since 2020. But it's tough: too much positivity feels forced, and too little feels like it glosses over serious issues. And there's a third rail when trying to express getting stuck without getting the player stuck. That sweet spot is tough to find.

Your choices don't matter much. That's the way things are sometimes. Some days, no matter someone's good will, you don't want to put up with them, and others, no matter how nasty they are, you're willing to put up with it. A friend will still drop by and help you bounce back from social isolation, and it sort of feels like they might be forcing themselves on you, though you-the-character and you-the-player know it isn't enough and want to do more and know you need to do more. So Glimmer knows not to force itself on you. But I also think that we need things forced on us sometimes, but we just don't know how or why. And looking back we wish certain people we liked had forced more on us (and, of course, certain people had forced less on us. But Glimmer is not about that, thankfully.)

While I'd have liked to see things more fleshed out (the character's first try going out. I know for instance just going to the grocery store or athletic club once the COVID lockdowns was over were both big) I realized that, well, I'd had people bring me back to a forum (like here) with just a like on a comment, and I hoped I'd been able to do that in some way for others. So I think and hope I got what the author intended. I was able to look back without having to relive the fear.

I also saw a parallel between Glimmer's main character and reviewing IFComp. Getting into the swing of things, or back into it, is tricky, and you have to start small, sometimes, whether it's with your own writing or reviewing others'. I reviewed Glimmer early on, and it was welcoming, though I just wish it would've led somewhere bigger--perhaps there's a message here that after someone checks on you, you need to go find more stuff for yourself that you might like, and perhaps that might mean the author's other works.

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The Lottery Ticket, by Anonymous

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Modernizing and Interactivizing(?) Chekov, a quick foray, November 24, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

This review may be more about what I believe Dorian Passer is trying to achieve in general, or tried to achieve, rather than the specific work, though I think in this case, a Chekov short story you might not be aware of works better than Cost of Living did for ParserComp 2022.

It feels like there should be a cottage industry for stateful narratives and their relatives, well beyond the Cliff's Notes my teachers warned me against in high school, and of course well above the synopses you can pull from websites that offer to write an essay for a fee. I always felt Cliff's notes got dragged down in symbolism, and anyway, the good teachers knew what was in the Cliff's Notes, so you could only really avoid bad grades that way. What did help (he said cynically) was knowing what the teachers liked, their unconscious biases. So I was always a bit suspicious of English class and the next great short story. I enjoyed nuance, sure, and figuring what could be. But it always felt that people who were working for that A were a step ahead of me. They knew what to say, and they knew how to say it without some pretty smart teachers detecting that they knew, or if the teachers knew, the students knew how to put in enough that you couldn't argue they didn't deserve the A. This doesn't discount that some people deserved an A, but there is some cynicism about studying a work and trying to interpret it that I still haven't shaken off.

And I don't mean "cottage industry" as a derogatory term or "this isn't high art." I'm well aware other people could turn that argument, or something more harsh, on my own stuff. It's that I think we need something that will require minimal effort for us to twiddle, to see changes based on a few things we try. The payoff will surely be better than, say, FreeCell where we've developed that strategy to win 90% of the time and sense it's useless to get to 95%, but darn if we don't keep doing it, because each card-shuffle feels different, you know.

TLT, or a replication of its idea, feels in the same vein as chess videos where, say, GothamChess or Agadmator, two Youtubers with over a million subscribers, go through a game or list of games. The basic presentation is formulated, and they even have catch phrases that have developed naturally, as a way to keep us involved. They analyze sidelines, some worthy and some boobytrapped. And it feels like there's room for more in that boat, which is good for knowledge and variety but bad for my free time. Agadmator is more likely to cover classic games, or lesser-known games from a grandmaster's simultaneous exhibition. GothamChess is far more current. Hikaru Nakamura, who needs less introduction, can discourse at length about his own game.

Why the heck can't we have those options with literature? Well, one problem is, literature doesn't have the equivalent of a programmable chess engine, and it's even harder to say "that phrase is good" or "that paragraph is bad." Understanding is more organic. Sometimes it's based on realizing that, say, that poem of Robert Frost's means the opposite of what it means from a cursory glance and seeing why it goes beyond "simple sincerity." And it's just more fun to look at a chessboard than a bunch of words or to say "hey, look what the engine is saying, this is something the presenter couldn't have fit in to a fifteen minute video. I'd like to do my own exploration." For me, it was tough to find that exploration. There were simple what-ifs to ask. Sure, I enjoyed a story with a surprise twist, or where it wasn't clear what the narrator meant, or what the character did after (either option seemed equally likely,) but even there I could picture Mister I-Know-How-To-Get-A's dropping his two cents in, over my shoulder. Even if I hadn't seen him for a while.

TLT inverts that for me, and that seems both due to the subject matter as well the author's general intent. Chekov's story is relatively simple. Someone thinks he's won the lottery. Suspicions pop up. Could and should he hide the news? Windfalls going bad have been done before and will be done again, but there's always a new perspective. Chekov really Gets It, and in a more visceral way than Cost of Living did. I mean, Cost of Living was prescient, but when it starts talking about debt and interest rates, it potentially loses some zing, even though the issues (keeping up with the Joneses, being in debt over items you didn't want to buy, and so forth) are very relevant. So I can see why I might not have heard of the author but I still enjoyed CoL as well as their other stuff, though I was glad to be exposed to the story. The main thrust, though, is this: change a few things that may seem fixed or obvious, and we can reinterpret or reimagine it in a more modern vein. What do certain words mean if we ascribe different intent? Sometimes, it's obvious, but with the right stories, it gives us insight into human nature, and maybe even times where we ourselves have been fooled or confused and don't want that to happen again.

Chekov's story is ancient but in parallel with something more modern-day. It's odd to remember that a much smaller amount of money was once paid out in lotteries, but certain things remain. The administrators get their cut, so the expected value of a lottery ticket is less than its purchase value. I know that even if the lottery ticket paid out more than you spent, after taxes, there's a concept called marginal utility. (In plain English, that second million is a lot less useful than the first.) People have no idea how to manage money and go into debt. It's sad. I read a book by a person who negotiated lump-sum settlements for lotteries paid out over 20 years (and yes, the lotto winnings don't mention this payout, and that $1 million 20 years from now has less value, because inflation.) The person eventually felt awful about their job, and I remember how they noted starving horses at the farm of one lotto winner. This is all relatively technical.

Modernizing TLT feels like it would be a trivial jump, and maybe it is, but it's one worth making. In Passer's remake, you get to choose a few adjectives. Is someone genuinely happy they might win the lotto? How willing are they to actually share? How much of friends' sharing via instant messaging is actually altruistic? Anything seems possible.

You can play through a few times, and if the game text doesn't change, the text still has a different flavor based on what you say. Well, to me. Your friends' accusations (eating the sauce you're cooking raw, thus depriving your friends of a bit of it, is contrasted well with how much of your lottery winnings you might share) are constant, and I didn't keep very rigorous notes, but acting with bravado or standoffishness does change things. And at the end you seem to want to buy one more lotto ticket, despite having UBI and so forth. Which brings up a lot of questions–the lotto is about more than just having more money, it's about dreams, and yet on the other hand, those dreams, once realized, are ruined. And there have to be better ways to bring people together than the lotto, but it's sort of taken over, because it's the easiest way to find something in common.

Now, a writing like TLT clearly seems to have limited range for any particular story it may cover. But on the other hand, it feels like it could be applied to many other writings I always wanted to read but never did, when I'm not quite ready to read passively. I like that it doesn't pretend to be an exciting, sweeping new modernization of a famous old tale. It simply reminds us that things are, in many ways, as they were, despite technology creeping up and the size of a lottery growing astronomical. Chekov's summer villa we'll never use becomes timeshares or a yacht we can't use often. There is only so much to say about this subject, and that's okay, because there have to be others, from stories by authors famous or not.

I really do wish I had something like this in my inbox every day, or even a couple times a week, to poke through, because it would be time far more well spent than clickbait. Maybe that "it does what it can, and that's good" seems faint praise compared to "well, this is soaring art," but it's good and needed and if more of us did this for favorite authors or stories the rest of the world didn't know about or should, the Internet would be closer to the repository of ideas or questions that people dreamed TV would be in the '50s. There's enough great stuff, of course. It can soar, if you know where to look (e.g. the Daily Show gives news and asks questions and reminds us that some people in power or the public spotlight, or constantly seeking that sort of thing are, in fact, those who least deserve it.) You don't need to write a thesis in a 300-level college class to have access to it, either. There's a snappy trade of ideas that leads you into a hall with a lot of doors. Perhaps a lot of those doors leave you disappointed to know you're not so original to have thought of X before, but then you realize others have given you a boost to where you can start with the real ideas.

I think we've reached that self-sustaining point for more concrete stuff. Math, chess, etc., are some examples. I'm saturated with videos there, along with Youtube channels on psychology and building social skills. But videos don't seem to work as well for written words as, well, this sort of thing does. And I recognize it might lose something in mass-production. But I remember being awed by a library as a kid and thinking "I never could read all this" but I would so love to make a dent, and works like this give me confidence I still can. (Of course, this may already be out there in some form. I'd be glad to be wrong. But we can always use more, in quantity, quality, and tone.)

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Death by Lightning, by Chase Capener

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Double-crossing, sex and ... low resolution?!, November 24, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

Oh my. Putting GameBoy-style graphics with a narrative where you've just finished having gay sex. That's a heck of a contrast, for sure, given attitudes towards homosexuality when the GameBoy came out. And my main quibble with all this is that you have to keep pushing "Z" to see relatively little text, some of which repeated. I've gone all old man yelling at cloud about this sort of thing before, but in this case, it was more that I'd like to see what's going on, and I'd like to piece things together better, and I wish there'd at least be an option to get the game to cooperate more after, say, three or four endings. There also was some worry I'd get impatient and start button-bashing and miss some of the text. I'm also not sure why the title is what it is. I found a lot of other creative and interesting ways to die, and there was lightning, but I didn't find the ending where you died by lightning. Perhaps it was the "best" one?

Unfortunately my enduring aesthetic memory is of the text chopped up like the timed text from Twine, and it backs up even one playthrough. This is okay at first when you're getting your bearings, but DbL seems meant to be replayed, and a lack of UNDO hurts this. This may be a feature for some. But in IFComp, with my goal to get through a lot of entries, I find it to be a bug. The work simply stops once you've reached a conclusion, too. Nevertheless, I took several diverging paths through and had a general idea what was going on, and overall what was there seemed good. So it's not a "waiter, the food is terrible! And such small portions!" sort of thing.

There was also a neat feature where the screen flashed, but it we assume all the threads are continuous, lightning kept striking at different times. I wasn't able to determine whether the player should be coming to a realization I missed, but I thought the screen flashing worked well with the low-resulution graphics. With more detail, or the game taking more of the browser, all the technical stuff might feel like it was trying too hard to call attention to itself. I fortunately don't have any physical reaction a flashing screen, but nonetheless, it was nice it wasn't overdone.

From what I saw, you're trying to betray your lover, but you're wanted, yourself. They have a truck outside the mountain lodge where you are both staying, and you, for reasons not immediately obvious, cannot let them leave. So do you take the truck or try to convince your lover to stay? Taking the truck risks accidents and meeting the local (very) wildlife, but staying in the cabin risks a fight, as they have a past that's not clear, too. Whatever your web of double-crossing and intrigue, you're pretty much, well, screwed.

The gimmick of a GameBoy-style game is clever, and I've generally enjoyed entries that give this retro feel. But unfortunately, with this entry having no exploration components, the design choice probably backfired in terms of placement in IFComp. I just wish there'd been more latitude to explore without having to repeat myself so much, or at least a way to increase screen size to see more at once, because there were some branches I didn't look into and wanted to, and without UNDO it was hard to keep track. Perhaps labeling a branch yellow or red based on how much you'd seen (some/all) would work, even if it violated the GameBoy aesthetic? The writing seems fast-paced and I was disappointed that certain design choices slowed it down, not to give us more chances to think about things, but to say, no, you can't quite move ahead.

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Through the Forest with the Beast, by Star

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A quick journey through a trap-loaded forest, November 24, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

The opening screen promises a lot: a well-done background, effective and non-intrusive sound, and a request to pick your name and a color that corresponds to you. There's a list of stats (health, thirst, hunger.) It's for, well, an escape through a forest, to a place where people with the same Mark you have can be safe.

We get a fast-paced story, too, but it goes by too quickly without really knowing what the protagonist is like. One vulnerability in particular wasn't mentioned. There aren't many locations in the forest, and you can find shelter in both hostile and friendly locations. There's food and water, but if you're already too full or not thirsty, it does more bad than good. You're also vulnerable to rain, which I didn't pick up on until I ran into a bad ending.

I played through a few times. There were a few random deaths, but beyond them, escaping is not too hard, if you're suspicious of everyone who seems remotely harmful. Perhaps most interesting was my final play-through when someone offered me clothes in their one-room hut in the middle of a downpour. Removing the clothes would reveal my mark, but going into the rain meant death. This was one of the more concrete choices in the story, beyond going forward and back, and with more like this the story would be very strong indeed, but then again, it was never explained in the over-general beginning.

A lot of the action is scattershot, too, and the stats aren't really used as much as they could be. Why marked people were viewed suspiciously was hidden beyond a general assumption that marks are bad. And I wish I could've undone stuff. As it was, I had to open up a new tab for each play through the story. It all feels a bit too earnest, often introducing something you should've known mid-story. The world's been built, and it feels like it has the standard features, but the author doesn't have control of it, and they never fully commit to using the statistics, or building a story, so it never fully gels beyond being a quick affair where you maybe find a couple ways to make it out and move on. Things like penalties for eating when full were interesting and showed good general understanding, but TTFWTB never really sang to me in quite the way that, say, Under the Bridge did from the '22 comp.

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HOURS, by aidanvoidout

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Frenetic, with an interesting end, but uncontrolled, November 22, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

HOURS certainly jumps right in: you're a soldier who has had a mortal wound, and an apparition tells you, hey, come with me and kill the evil Shogun who's been controlling your mind. Hey, you're going to die anyway. A compelling start!

You have that choice of staying at home or actually going for revenge. And I think early on, the work established it would be a bit too on the nose: "stay in your room and die" is, well, direct, as is much of the dialogue. That said, I think it provides, relatively speaking, the best writing. It doesn't feel like it's trying too hard to induce excitement. This part is linear, where you have a different thought in each of your final hour. It seems quite focused, maybe because the author didn't have to worry about game states or branches or whatever. And of course the player can just undo things.

Once they do, the on-the-nose dialogue does come into play. We've all done it, where we've forced in where we need to. I like to refer to Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie's very polite spies, Tony and Control, for guidance. They spell things out a bit too much and are a bit too formal and still always getting to know each other. It's sort of sweet but also a reminder that we can often say things that don't need to be said, both in life and in literature, and that can ruin the mood. For instance, "poor soul... you've seen so many horrors in this battle... if only the kings, sitting in their ivory towers, understood what the common folk like you went through..."

As for the story? I'll bring up something else: the movie Streets of Fire. Things seemed to sprawl until they sort of clicked at the end. Like that movie, there appear to be a lot of anachronisms and cliches, and I think they're deliberate. The Shogun is 300 years old and still youthful, so something is going on here. You are Jack, and he is Charlie. You have swords alongside suits and communications devices, along with an old-fashioned slave auction. The chaos seems deliberate, but it quickly feels uncontrolled, even if everything is tied up at the end. And the ending I got with reaching the Shogun certainly brought things together--my guess is (Spoiler - click to show)the character is not the only person the spirit gave this offer to, and perhaps that is part of how the Shogun has retained their energy. Which is pretty heavy stuff! But sometimes with the helter-skelter writing, it felt more like you were in an express grocery line that suddenly shut down once the cashier had to go on a two-hour-overdue break.

Certainly the ending, along with the small detours I could take (talking to people versus immediately getting to the point) made me wonder if there was any way I could save time and avoid falling at the final hurdle. I did not find it. Nevertheless, the dialogues in the tavern helped bring out some of the story I didn't see when speed running so I didn't waste a single minute. There's obviously something supernaturally weird about the Shogun, and the story of how his henchmen pronounced him as blame-free was effective to me.

Perhaps HOURS wished to make the point that there was nothing you could do, or it went for the "it was all a dream"/Incident at Owl Creek angle. Perhaps it meant, deliberately, that pulling an arrow out of your flesh and not having it hurt was a sign things were already on the paranormal end, or you were already half-dead. That seems even likely. The contrast of reflecting on your family in your room and being forced to see the Shogun's past works well. But the less-than-tight dialogue and sometimes over-earnest narration got in the way of that. While you needed to be in a rush, unnecessary description that sprawled jumped back to where the narrative skipped a bit. That cut down both the urgency and any idea of how close I was, and it's a place where having a "you are here" style map, in the status bar or one click away, seems the sort of thing IFComp is built to allow and encourage. Even posting the time outside of the "go to your room and doe" ending or saying "you've lost track of time--you can only judge it by the sun/stars" would add to this. As-is, I felt hurried along, so the tension didn't build as it should have.

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Tower of Plargh, by caranmegil

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A "my first game" in Inform with some charm, November 21, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

The Tower of Plargh is a short puzzle game where you must do stuff and then push a big button in a center room to advance, once you’ve done what you needed. There are jokey bits in here, too. The room names made me laugh a bit but also wonder if there was a fifth room, since the initial 4 rooms differed by which vowel was in the 3rd position. I spent time wondering if there was some head-fake ending where I'd missed a clever detail, though disassembling the gblorb changes nothing.

Also there’s a bit of trickery with the game map--the tower is bigger than it seems at first glance. The jokes may be a bit flippant to stick in your memory, but on the other hand, there are no mind-reading puzzles. There are a few items and you can figure what to do just because the author didn’t try to overwhelm you with details. Apparently the author wrote it for his daughter, so there were serious limits on how complex he wanted to make it, but then these limits ran up against IFComp expectations.

The puzzles feel relatively straightforward, though the final bit in level 4 was kind of tricky, and a "why" is missing beyond "because it is there." In level 4 it took me a while to realize an NPC left right after you saw them, even though they pretty clearly were a jumpy sort, so there was a lack of description. With minimal verb-guessing, I figured what to do. There’s a small bug where the NPC from level 4 is wandering around in level 5, so I chased a red herring there. Perhaps ToP was simple enough I was sort of hoping for one.

The rooms didn't change names as I went up the tower, I suspect as an attempt to reuse code. However, the end result is that it feels like a programming exercise more than a game. So although there’s no walkthrough, you’re probably not going to get stuck if you resort to trial and error, likely the sort that needs only minimal knowledge of parsers. This made Plargh a nice whimsical diversion before playing far darker games with content warnings, although since its focus is simple-to-trivial puzzles, it doesn't establish a super-strong identity. So it sunk to the lower end of IFComp. But as a first work it is nothing to be ashamed of.

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Trick or Treat or Trick or Treat or Trick, by Stewart C Baker

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Groundhog Day for kids, November 15, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: EctoComp 2022

One of the things you have to face when you are writing a SpeedIF is, what should I leave out? It's stuff you'd rightly get destroyed for leaving out in a more robust piece. ToToT makes the right choice here, as what it leaves out only adds to the brief timed puzzle. (Plus, UNDO blocking is left out. Strictly speaking, it should not be, but for me, it added to the feeling of being stuck.)

It can't be the first Groundhog Day style game, and I've probably played one and forgot, but it fits the format well. You're knocking at the door of Old Man McGuffin, because your friends dared you, and when he answers, he sticks you with a weird-science item that sticks you in a temporal loop. You need to dump it on some poor unsuspecting soul. You have a fixed amount of turns, or you'll wind up having to do things over again.

And here's where the puzzle gets interesting. Stuff like directions to exit and so forth aren't revealed, because this game was written in 4 hours. So you wind up bumping around a lot, and in fact it's probably more efficient to avoid finding the items you might need first to make a map! This would be a poor design choice for IFComp, but here, it reinforces you're a little kid who's walked out well past where they should, and you're pretty lost. (My technical side notes it'd be neat to have a post-comp release that slowly fleshes out the directions you tried. That could be a programming exercise that takes well over four hours!)

There aren't many items, and if there were too many, things would be a mess. However, I always enjoy a good candy joke and seeing the box of L&L's (REAL candy! But you don't have time to eat it!) reminded me of the box of W&W's that the Suspicious-Looking Guy gave you every Halloween in Kingdom of Loathing, back when I played that game too much and enjoyed it.

I admit I disassembled to see the text of what happened at the end. I'd come up one move short, and I had trouble actually finding the person to give it to, though I knew they must be around. One feels sorry for the poor schlep.

ToToT reminded me of Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree by sort of being its opposite in many big choices. You're alone in ToToT, but HT has a whole group of kids. In ToToT, you're in essence getting free time as a kid and extending your Halloween beyond what you thought possible, while HT takes a year off the end of each kid's life. But I think each, if it actually happened, would provide a kid with a bunch of neat weird stuff to share for years. As for the end, I enjoyed thinking about why your friends may've poked you to see Mr. McGuffin. The possible motivations can vary greatly depending on how much they actually know about him.

There are spoilers I want to add and spoiler-fy, because they gave me a good chuckle going down some mental back-roads, but I don't want to add them into the review until after EctoComp, if at all. Part of the fun is being in that area of optimal confusion-versus-progress I think ToToT hits well.

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Midnight at Al's Self Storage, Truck Rentals, and Discount Psychic Readings, by Thomas Insel
Amusing MacGuffins and long title make for a fun brief exploration, August 11, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: ParserComp 2022

Long titles always give me pause. Will they indicate a long, sprawling game? Or will the game have a tight focus, as sort of a reversal joke, so tight you think they overdid it with the super long title? In the case of Midnight (spelling the acronym would take more keystrokes,) thankfully, there's little to worry about. It's short and tidy and subverts the "pointless task in lousy weird job" genre without overusing the zany or "lousy jobs are lousy" angles. It's well-organized. I replayed it quickly after ParserComp, and though there's only one tricky puzzle, I still fluffed it at first and then felt happy once it was fixed.

You start out with an undemanding task left by your mysterious manager: find three boxes and bring them to the loading dock to the north. The first requires little more than exploration. The second requires fiddling with locks on an elevator. Some may find this tiresome, but it made me recall bad experiences with a frieght elevators and padlocks (not together, thankfully) which the passage of time had healed. The constraints are tongue-in-cheek, as you can't leave the basement if you are even carrying a mere task list. While it's busy work and meant to be, I enjoyed seeing something different than the Towers of Hanoi and the 3-, 4- and 5-liter jugs, and it underscored how badly managed your rental shop was.

Things get interesting after you place the second box on the loading dock. The weather changes. The place shakes enough that you can carry not just a task list into the basement but everything in the game that's not nailed down! This was an exhilarating moment of freedom. Not only that, but a previously-locked door is now open! This was a relief, considering all the futzing with keys and padlocks I'd done earlier.

On your way to finding the third box, you have visions. They contribute to why your place of employment is weird, and you have something to set right. It's not very hard, but it's satisfying, and it ended too soon, with the promise of a sequel I will be glad to enjoy.

Midnight certainly is economical in design if not in its title. And its brevity and oddness make its wit stay. And if the sequel takes a while, I will have stuff to tide me over. I hadn't realized this was the author's third work.

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Gent Stickman vs Evil Meat Hand, by AZ / ParserCommander

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Well, you can always hook ME with stick figures!, August 5, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: ParserComp 2022

Gent Stickman stood out immediately for me, not just for its title, but for its stick-figure drawings. My relationship with drawing is a thorny one. I'd like to be more realistic, but I do enjoy the humor a well-done stick-figure drawing can do. It just has to be thoughtful, and yet, stick figures can help take an edge off serious subjects so you can cope with them. This is the case with Gent Stickman, a small game with relatively few rooms and a simple parser. All the responses are in graphics, including the error messages, which is nice because sometimes the default messages are annoying even when they don't try to be.

This is a successful design choice as I see it. If I'm correct, The author's first language is not English, and the game does have a universal feel. I wasn't surprised to see they'd won the Spanish version of EctoComp, based on this effort. They could certainly write in English. I mean, GS is definitely one of the most fun and creative titles I've seen in my gaming exploits. So they could definitely hammer something respectable out in English. But what they did was slick. They know what they're doing, and they never need to drill it in your head how clever they are. There are hints and death scenes, and the hints are particularly nice because, well, you still have a bit to figure from some of them--but nothing unfair!

And they do form a nice story of where you've been and where you're going. I've certainly had instances where I saw one hint too many and felt like I was just taking transcription, and that didn't happen here. The graphics cut through the "push X for next hint" instructions, only revealing one additional hint per room per hint request. This left GS feeling quite welcoming. They also pushed back on one of my pet-peeve straw-men in web-based games: timed text. After a certain amount of that, I always picture someone pausing pompously for dramatic effect, but here it's like a small funny YouTube clip you could watch several times.

As for the story? Well, you, Gent Stickman, are--well, the guy people see on a bathroom sign. Your beloved is your female counterpart. She has been kidnapped and locked up in a high castle guided by a pit. There aren't many rooms, and the game establishes early that compass directions are Not a Thing. One error graphic shows an X'd out compass with left and right replacing it. The main verb to figure is -- well, you have to guess it, but it's not a blind guess, and (Spoiler - click to show)this game gets away with it where others wouldn't.

And solving the puzzles gives some nice cut scenes that remind me of the sort of flip-books I used to make in second grade, though this is clearly more clever than that. It left me wondering why someone didn't think of this-all before, and I hope to see more of it. Jumping over the pit has a lot more drama than "PUSH SPACE TO CONTINUE." There's doubt if you'll make it over. And yes, there are a few surprise instadeaths that make you want to restart, but once you know what to do, it doesn't take too long to get back. They're all worth seeing.

GS has some interesting innovations in streamlining the player experience, which makes for a lot of fun that's over a bit too soon. I'm certainly glad to see it's marked as one of a series. It's one of those games you can just enjoy, and on reflection, you realize the author did a bit more than throw out silly yet satisfying jokes. While obviously "ha ha ha this game is meant to be a simple satire/joke" can be overdone, it definitely isn't here, and I really enjoy these quick booster games that remind you you don't need anything super complex to have reasonably clever fun.

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Uncle Mortimer's Secret, by Jim MacBrayne

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
An entertaining old-school romp through time, August 4, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: ParserComp 2022

Uncle Mortimer's Secret intimidated me, but at the same time, I wanted to play it. Details leak out from a game's reviews even if nobody means to spoil anything. And that worked both to draw me in and push me away. It was obviously a big game with a custom (and old-school) parser, replete with scoring, but it was also well-organized, by someone who knew what they were doing. It probably got fewer ParserComp votes than average because of the custom parser. It's got its oddness, but that's not a cover for the author's laziness or inability to put a story together. It feels more focused and assured than Somewhere, Somewhen, which the author submitted to the previous ParserComp, which had That Something. UMS had a lot more, maybe because the author didn't need to focus as much energy on the parser itself. It was the first ParserComp game I came back to post-judging, and I was surprised how quickly I did so. I'm grateful to the people who pushed others to play this game, and I hope I can do for so beyond ParserComp.

Your eccentric uncle Mortimer has disappeared and left you a letter. He's gotten involved in magic and alchemy, and he's probably been captured by someone quite evil. To rescue him, you need to visit several important time periods and events, and you may not have to do much, but when you do, you'll gain the trust of historical figures Mortimer meant and get the next piece of the puzzle. You travel through time by twiddling four numbers on a bracelet while in Mortimer's machine, and for me, it was nice to be able to get something right before doing what I had to.

I did so in all cases except the (Spoiler - click to show)Whitechapel murders in 1888, I was clueless as I never connected them to Jack the Ripper. This isn't all bad; for me, it was nice to know a lot without knowing everything, and also there was enough of a new spin on (Spoiler - click to show)Kennedy's assassination in 1963. I think with this sort of buffet-line approach to important historical events there's always going to be something you wished to see more or less of, and nobody's pleased perfectly, so your tastes may differ from mine, but overall it should work out right. For me the funniest puzzle was finding (Spoiler - click to show)Sir Francis Drake's bowling ball in 1588.

Eventually you do find Uncle Mortimer with a weird tesseract puzzle. The journey is worth it to me, though you will have to dedicate a lot of time. But it's the sort of game you can blow by with a walkthrough, if you have to, and you will get a lot out of it, and maybe in a few weeks you'll find yourself coming back to it, too, to see how much you remember. I found, briefly poking around, I enjoyed both what I remembered and what I forgot.

A few things still slow it up a bit, though. I'd still like to see a more understanding parser--the disambiguation isn't great, and there are some abbreviations, but maybe I'm spoiled with Inform. I'm pretty confident that the author will tweak what they want and need, though, given how they've honed a lot from the promise shown in Somwhere, Somewhen.

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Sindrella's Potions, by Tristin Grizel Dean

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Fixable bugs dent an enjoyable story/mechanic, June 7, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: TALP 2022

As a rule I'm not big on retellings of an old story. You'd better bring something new to the table. And in Sindrella's Potions, you do. Your grandmother is Cinderella, and before you go to a ball, you put on a slipper and become her. Your quest is to make it to the ball, but to do so, you'll need to buy a gown and slippers and make transport.

The way to do this, unsurprisingly given the story's name, is by making potions, mostly to help other people, who pay you in coins. You have a cauldron to put ingredients in--ingredients are marked clearly in your inventory. Each recipe has three ingredients, and it doesn't fully spoil anything, but it hints things rather strongly. So you may have to do a bit of trial-and-error.

This worried me a bit, as I immediately assumed a problem with using up ingredients (e.g. at one point you get a thread, and I was worried if you messed things up you'd have to get another) but this isn't the case. You can keep trying until things work. And you can figure a potion without the recipe, but it probably takes less time to find things.

As for finding potion recipes, you do this for trying sensible but not straightforward things. It might be talking to people, or SMELL or TASTE or TOUCH. In one case, there's a new verb, but given the item, it's not hard.

The game is well-implemented and even allows you to solve a side puzzle for a portable cauldron, so you don't have to go back to your cottage to mix things. It even has hints--though here, sometimes there's the unintentional side effect of hiding something that should be in plain view. Or you'll ask for a hint, and the advice will disappear before you can use it, e.g. "Potion X requires A, B and C" in a place where you don't need Potion X and then HINT again says "you're done here." I wound up overlooking something much more basic--I missed 2 ingredients because I didn't search the scenery, and some words were highlighted and some weren't. So I'd like to see more robust hints in a re-release saying "You may've forgotten to examine everything in (room x)" or even "you have 2 more ingredients that can be found by looking through each room." Here a little help is a bad thing, because I assumed I was done with certain areas when I was not.

And as of June 2022 I found a bug that seemed to get me stuck for good. The (Spoiler - click to show)note seems to be needed as an ingredient, and it's in your inventory, but you can't put it in the cauldron. The author is very conscientious about providing updates, and though their life may be busy, I suspect they'll find a way to add things in once they have the time, because they have a commitment to strong craft.

That said, until you run into this bug, it's quite well done, and I enjoyed my time, and I liked the potion mechanic. I'm just a bit disappointed to have missed out on the ending, and I think others must've shared my views, too, because SP placed surprisingly (to me) low in TALP 2022 relative to the enjoyment I got and the craft I saw.

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Carpathian Vampire, by Garry Francis

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Short vampire game works even for those who don't like vampires, May 17, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: TALP 2022

I admit I'm not much of a fan of vampires, so when the author asked for testers, I opted for his other game. I've been through the general vampire tropes, and they don't do much for me, whether it's humor that plays on said tropes or more detail than I want. Yet it's effective. The tutorial bit gets you inside the castle with no way out, and it's atmospheric, but on some level you know you'll need to (and you will) find the key to leave the castle.

So I believe I would've enjoyed testing this as well as Garry's other, because it fits really well as a TALP entry, giving clues where you need it and providing a clear path through. I think while having a tutorial is good, having other bumpers along the way to follow up is better, so it's not just about helping people through a text adventure but letting them know what to expect. And the tutorial never quite ends--it seems to know when to give a small nudge. In this case, making light has its pitfalls. There are sensible ways to mess up, and the game says, hey, look at what's in your inventory.

There's another bit where your inventory is full from all the items, and you have some choices of what to drop. You never have to inventory juggle, but the guidance is nice all the same. There aren't too many items, because the map is not too big, and generally there's a lot of sampling of ways text adventures should work.

I also must give credit to the HINT command. The game is not too difficult, though I used them a couple times for expedience or to make sure I was done. The hints are in brief four-line poetry like those old Burma-Shave ads, and they're quite catchy and succinct and sometimes even funny, even the "you're done here" nudge. And while the game's tone isn't humorous, it works well here, better than a dry "do this next." So the game is worth a replay for that alone.

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The Spooky Mansion, by Tim Jacobs

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Nostalgic, amusing graphics, May 17, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: TALP 2022

I come down on the non-serious side with EctoComp games, and so for me, The Spooky Mansion came a few months early. While the plot is potentially serious (your dog is lost in a haunted house,) the details are not. There's a pumpkin to talk to so you can enter the house. Skeletons offer you help in interesting ways. And there's a monster that'd be right at home in Space Quest blocking your way to some important rooms. It's a funny game and not too big, despite "Mansion" in the title, and sometimes smaller is better. Thinking back to my own experiences with learning to read, I certainly felt intimidated by larger books, and given this is for the Text Adventure Literacy Project, it's important to know how not to overwhelm the reader.

You really aren't going to need your puzzle-solving hat, either. What you need to do is clued pretty well, and if you examine and talk a lot, everything will fall out. There's a bit of repetition with one puzzle, but even that is in service of a few nice laughs. And of course you eventually find your way out.

I'd definitely play a longer game by this author, as the graphics alone drew me in, and the jokes kept me entertained. There were a few loose ends (why is your dog in a locked room? What's the (Spoiler - click to show)rake for in the shed?) but the priority was clearly on entertainment, which the game pulled off.

Bug note for the release I played: reaching for an item wrong doesn't get you the item you need. The (Spoiler - click to show)shiny object doesn't change into (Spoiler - click to show)the brass key if you REACH OBJECT WITH GUM. But given the general surroundings, I quickly said "wait, I bet that item's supposed to be (Spoiler - click to show)the key to the locked door to the west, but I just fished for it wrong.

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Raspberry Jam, by Sylfir
Simple youthful farm tasks, unpolished but effective, May 16, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: TALP 2022

While most TALP games focus on the parser, Raspberry Jam allows hyperlinks to get around its homebrew engine. That makes it an oddity in TALP right away. By the end, I wound up clicking keyword links much more than I used the parser, but the "click one text object, then another" fits the word/word aesthetic TALP requires and brings up the interesting question: might NOUN NOUN be a legitimate way to skip guess-the-verb?

It's quicker here, at least once you get the hang of things. Once I did, I realized the game was good work, despite its flaws. It's worth a play-through, as it's not very big. Overall, I saw what the author was doing, even if it was a bit hidden. But it never got beyond that for me. Reflecting on this game, it seemed like whatever praise I had was qualified with a "but," but on the other hand, so was criticism. So this review feels clinical, but it's the best way I know to say "yes, there will be obstacles, but this game's worth playing."

First, the plot: you're a young boy, living with your grandmother on a small farm. You're given tasks. The initial puzzle, bringing water from the well, is a good one to establish the tutorial part of the TALP jam. Then you need to go further in the woods to find more things Grandma asks from you. Nothing terribly dramatic or death-defying, so it's a good fit with the jam.

And as for the word "jam:" it's easy for me to picture a native English speaker thinking jam-the-food and jam-the-event were too alike to connect, and thus a game featuring jam would be too on-the-nose, right? But non-native speakers see things with new eyes we can't, so they had no such self-censorship, and I'm glad of that. The games are supposed to be child-friendly, and this one was. One puzzle obliquely concerns safety with sharp objects, something I didn't really learn until Boy Scouts, and it was certainly nicer than the yelling I remembered about what you'd better not do. (Yelling was not necessary.) I'm glad it was about more than just jam.

But on the other hand, the reason I bring up the author's not a native English speaker is because they do many logical-but-wrong things with English grammar (e.g. "an bucket"). This, though, gets a pass. Creating a custom engine is tricky, and they got that right (though there is a learning curve) and there's never any question what they meant. The writing overall has purpose and direction and doesn't deluge us, and perhaps it can fit in with the idea of a kid from a far-off land telling us about their day while maybe being a bit too excited and slipping up with a word here and there. There's more than enough substance and organization that we can allow RJ these slips and not feel like a condescending adult patting its hand. I still sometimes cringe when I say or think "Well, it's brave of them to even write in their second language," because there are so many ways to say it, but it's just one more variable to juggle when trying to program, and it can't be ignored.

That said, it would be nice to have some bumpers once we were done with a quest. This is difficult as there are some moving parts: you're able to return an axe to its storage place before you use it, and if you do so, you score five points, which are retracted once you take it down. Then once you've used the axe and stored it, you can take it down. Details like that. They aren't critical, but it feels like the author put in a good effort on the very important stuff and didn't quite have time to polish things. It's just stuff I feel they wouldn't have missed without the additional mental energy needed to write in a second language. There's also a nice bit of technical work where the author lets you scroll up and down in a room's description, but when I tried to make the screen bigger so all the text would fit, the text stretched.

I'm also up in the air about the ending. A few clues existed, but I left in disbelief for a bit. I wound up missing on the final five points, which are not on the task list. It's something that, emotionally, the story would be wrong to clue directly, since such an action shouldn't be forced. However, once someone else hinted it, I saw it immediately and realized I'd not been paying full attention, but I didn't really feel motivated to go back. So it was more "Oh, that makes sense!" than the emotional connection the author looked for.

Still, RJ seems like a successful experiment, technically, but the author may not have hit their creative stride. Yet. There's a lot to be sorted out, but RJ doesn't need saving, and at heart it's a small nostalgic game that's fun to work through and brings back a few memories. One can't argue the author is technically or creatively clueless. It's just a bit obvious where they miss the mark, and once you're able to accept a few shortcomings, it's a pleasant experience, and TALP is clearly the better for it.

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The Bright Blue Ball, by Clary C.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Animal protagonist, unusual verbs, smooth experience, May 16, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: Spring Thing 2022

I didn't get to look at nearly as many Spring Thing games as I'd hoped, but all the same, I'm glad I got to The Bright Blue Ball. It's surprisingly cheery for something with the topic BBB has, and I don't think I was the only one who needed that. I'm more a cat person than a dog person, but I wound up being quickly invested in the protagonist, who escapes from their safe home to look impulsively for, as the title suggests, a bright blue ball. It's their favorite, and they know they should know better, and they feel bad the moment they're out the door, but they have to find it. And they have quite an adventure before coming home.

It's no spoiler to mention that, yes, you do find the ball, meeting people along the way and solving the mystery for you-the-player without you-the-character fully understanding what's going on beyond their own needs and the needs of humans they meet in a deserted town. This is hardly new, but here it doesn't feel forced, and so I had the impression the author had good command of the story side of things. For instance, if you went back home too early, your family would say different things based on how far along you were in the game. As to why they can't or won't go outside, while others are, that makes a good deal of sense quickly. The constraints, such as being able to carry only one thing at once because you are a dog, aren't just there as a nuisance. They add to the realism, and here the inventory limits are complemented by not having a lot of useless items.

As an example of the strength of the game world, I ran into a game-state problem where I was locked out of a win (I took a circuitous route that missed a few clues and thus stress-tested things rigorously,) and it was pretty clear, because a room description conflicted with the narrative built up. But it was easy to remember what to do, and I enjoyed seeing clues I'd missed, and so forth. When something potentially disastrous like that works out okay, you know you have something good. And if this is fixed in the latest release, so much the better!

While it's dreadfully unfair to compare a first-time author's work to something like Toby's Nose in detail, I think it carves out emotions and story that Toby's Nose doesn't, and it offers promise that there are others. I'd like to see more games where SMELL is a prominent command. And I think the technical mistakes I saw were that of a first-time author, so if they have something else to share, I'm looking forward to their next work. They seem to have the important and harder-to-teach things right.

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Espiritu Roboto, by Ray Leandro

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Robot near end-of-use finds self-fulfillment, friends, May 15, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: TALP 2022

Espiritu Roboto establishes a lane early, and it's a strong one: you're a robot who is about to undergo repair or, more likely, a memory wipe. In your dialog with another machine, there are a bunch of errors reminiscent of an unhelpful parser in the starting cut-scene, and bam, you're dropped beneath a house where you and other robots work. Early on, you try to get back to work, but something is clearly wrong in a hurry. You don't want to go through reprogramming/repair/death, so you set your sights on escaping.

There are, of course, obstacles to get by. Some are physical and inanimate, some are robots, and some are human. There are even cats that obstruct you for a while. You have a dark area you need to find a light source for. You'll probably see where the escape is, but you don't have the skills to get out. For that, you need to find another entity.

An entity beyond the robot spirit (implied by the game's title) you pray to--this is a neat bit of verb choice, with THINK reminding you of what you did and PRAY asking new questions. While the question list gets filled up near the end--some clues are removed, and others aren't--it's still handy and efficient, and it's not the only custom verb that works well. They're all clued, and the parser has covered a lot of good guesses.

Surprisingly for a game about robots, the puzzles aren't really where it's at. That may say more about the narrative, or how the puzzles were combined into a very solid story for such a small game. For instance, in a library, you need to push stuff out of the way, but then to blend in with humans you need something else. There's a sign on a door that says "NO ROBOTS," and getting by is a puzzle, but once you reflect on things, it's all a bit sad and frustrating. And in one case, a solution to one puzzle temporarily blocks getting another item you need, but it makes a lot of sense.

The only place where I got in trouble was when I assumed an item had just one use. I visited a place far away (well, relatively--the map is not huge, and I'm grateful the author drew up a map) and used the item there instead of nearby. Using it nearby didn't quite register as it almost felt too on-the-nose. I can imagine others getting stuck here, especially since if you PRAY, the robot spirit assumes you used the item in the almost-too-obvious place, so I'll note (Spoiler - click to show)the laser pointer has two uses.

That's really minor, though. Espirito Roboto worked for me. I'd also like to call out its graphics as a clear positive. There's nothing super-fancy, but there's good variety, and it feels whimsical without feeling dashed off or calling attention to its absurdity. This sort of snuck up on me, and at some point I turned around and said, yeah, good job there.

There are a lot of longer games that go into emotions more in-depth than ER, but sometimes I am just not up to them. I often don't have the energy to fully appreciate them, so in a way, ER provided a sort of tutorial experience for someone who knows parser games but is a bit wary of taking on a huge dystopia or too-heavy issues. It had a high return on time invested for me, with just a bit of unhappiness and servitude and looking to connect with someone else who understands, someone beyond the bartender who serves bacon-laced alcoholic drinks. This was enough to push me to remember my own nuisance I wanted, and still want to, move on from.

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Library Quest, by starflame149

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Cute graphics, but be exact with nouns, May 15, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: TALP 2022

The cheery graphics in Library Quest quickly help reassure you nobody is going to be shushing you as you move between locations, or telling you to finally sit down and stop adventuring, or whatever. There's no deep research as you look to repair your mother's favorite vase, but there is exploration and discovery. So it's pretty low-key, and the atmosphere is favorable for a TALP game.

There are tangles, and I'd like to get them out of the way so you know what you can enjoy. Stuff like having the player DROP VASE to find a new and important item once you start looking on the ground is generally effective, and it wasn't until I finished the tutorial that I realized it was more on rails than I expected. Which was okay. Things don't have to be perfectly realistic, but sometimes the tutorial has you do stuff you don't use again, as when things taught to the player are only used once (GIVE ITEM, for instance--this is important for text adventures in general, but it distracted me a bit.) Other times, it works a lot better. You learn spells from scrolls, and the tutorial offers shortcuts by saying CAST and then a number. So that works okay, though there's some fiddling to X SCROLL, which gives a disambiguation question, then GET SCROLL, which gives another.

I'm being a bit fussy here, but this sort of thing slows things down and makes the tutorial feel a bit remedial and may also give a player the experience that all parser games force you to fight the parser. It seems fixable, though, as I think Adventuron has "does the player mean"-style coding syntax. And it's hardly fatal. But it's there.

So you go through the library, generally using one scroll to find the next, sometimes asking the librarian at the front about things. I got stuck there as I didn't fully spell out an item I needed. I managed to ask about (Spoiler - click to show)STOREROOM, STOREROOM DOOR, DOOR and KEY, without asking for the right thing. One hint also seemed to be misplaced--there's a plant you need to get by to read something on the desk, but the clue as to what verb to use is in a note on the desk. Then later I assumed I had another action was implicit. So the game feels a bit pedantic with what you need to do, even for a tutorial jam.

It's still got its share of fun, though. Once I was done, I was left wishing there was more of it. The spellcasting mechanic is well done, and the puzzle in the restricted area was foreshadowed nicely. Once things clicked, they clicked. And while I noticed occasional bugs (blank responses to retrying things that pushed the game forward) and also one scroll that kept reappearing if you searched the bookshelf twice, the world was well-built enough that the author can and probably will fix that sort of thing quickly, rendering parts of this review obsolete. (I never did figure (Spoiler - click to show)what the bucket or the water spell was for, either.)

But this is one of those games where I found a lot of quibbles because I was glad to pay attention. I could definitely do with an expanded version featuring more of an emphasis on exploring a logically laid-out library (e.g. rooms/branches for different subjects or combining spells) and less on fiddling with the parser.

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Kobold in Search for Family, by tosxychor

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Satisfying if slightly bumpy, May 14, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: TALP 2022

I admit the title put me off a bit. The wrong preposition could signal much more serious problems. But fortunately the game turned out not just satisfactory but satisfying for me, even though some of the puzzles would wind up forcing me to wangle more than average.

The plot is simple. You, as a young kobold, fall off a cart and wind up in a human city. Since humans don't like kobolds, you need to sneak around. The first puzzle seems simple: find a disguise to blend in. Except it's not that easy! And that's where some custom verbs, along with USE X ON Y syntax (something I'm a big fan of), kick in. One custom verb in particular is clued and makes sense, and it's phased out as you solve puzzles.

You also have SEARCH MEMORY to see if you need to do anything in a location. It's interesting to require such a long command for hints--it certainly deterred me for going to spoilers. However, sometimes I went in for a spoiler when I didn't need to. I had the puzzle figured, but I didn't quite have the right syntax, so I wound up checking if I was on the right track. I was, and things seemed clued well enough, but this broke immersion a bit despite SEARCH MEMORY avoiding fourth walls. For instance, one puzzle requires USE X ON Y, but I didn't take X because X seemed kind of heavy and similar to another object I couldn't pick up. So I went with a bit of parser trial-and-error, but fortunately, there were very few errors to make.

There are also a few auto-deaths with timed puzzles where humans are getting closer. You just have to leave and return to reset the timer, but it's enough to create atmosphere. I wound up running ahead too fast after solving one non-timed puzzle, not realizing a useful item I left behind. So I thought "okay, okay, timed puzzle" while it happened, but it had a knock-on effect: I was that kid, running ahead, looking for their family, not taking the time to get centered and see everything that could help.

The timed puzzles start out pretty easy (just take something and leave) but the final puzzle requires a bit of prep beforehand. In one case, using a verb with an implicit object not only gives a reject but uses a turn. That's not too bad, as you can auto-save, but it's not very hospitable. I also worried I'd gotten in an unwinnable state when I seemed to have consumed an item I didn't, due to a reject message ((Spoiler - click to show)the game says you burned the plain stick, though it's still in your inventory).

Nevertheless, what was going on was pretty clear. There were a few "you can't quite do that" moments that forced me to make logic leaps that were generally pleasing once I pushed on to the next room. And while it's pretty linear, there are clues of side locations once you're stuck, and you'll realize you're stuck. The final puzzle has probably been seen and done before, but it's well done. At what I didn't know was the final room at the time, I felt the game might be ruined if it dragged on too much. There was potential for a maze, but the author cut things off, and it made for a strong or at least tidy ending.

So KiSfF has some rough spots, enough a post-comp release could boost it nicely (lots of parser clarification, implicit verbs and verb synonyms, and also custom bits like changing the RESTART from the generic "Would you like to forfeit the game?") but they're the sort that I think if you know of them ahead of time, you'll be prepared to sit back and enjoy it. And the tutorial does a good job of showing you what you can do.

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Danse Nocturne, by Joey Jones

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
memories of year-end speedIf ... and (successful) experimentation, May 6, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

For the first Year-End Speed-IF I participated in, I was a bit worried I wouldn't fit everything in that was suggested. I was assured that was okay. I did my best. There were some really good efforts that put everything together. I was proud to sit down and get writing. I think I got some good laughs. Danse Nocturne got more.

It didn't contain any of the suggested items or plot lines. It was definitely its own thing--not guess-the-verb--more guess the adverb, telling you how you, as a lady being courted, should dance. A lot is clued in the story and text, but you can guess and improvise and go against the story's grain without punishment, too. Guess-the-adverb works rather better and not just because you're spotted the last two letters immediately. There's no real way to gauge, at least at first, how well you're doing or what ending you'll get to the poem. There are several, and based on the stanzas you get, you decide what to do next. Guessing wrong gives an interlude-ish sort of line, which is far cheerier than the standard parser errors.

So this is a sort of guessing game, and there's not necessarily a right answer. You just follow it where it goes, and generally after fewer than twenty adverbs, you get an ending. They run the gamut of emotions.

I don't want to spoil the mechanics too much other than to say it's a Speed-IF game and there's no huge surprise and no need to twist your brain, but there's enough you'll keep engaged and probably won't try experimenting formally and measuring what does what for a while. It's possible, but it ruins the experience if you do so too soon.

So I was impressed and glad Joey broke the rules to bring everyone Danse Nocturne. I wanted to see the source, but I'm glad waiting for the source somehow got lost in the shuffle. I think I had a binary on my computer that I poked at, trying to figure the mechanics, and when I finally noticed the source was up, I was a bit sad to lose some of the mystique. But as a programmer, it was very nice to see relatively simple code (the long topic snippets amuse me--Joey recognized coding conventions were the last thing to worry about when trying to cram content into a 3-hour speed-IF, and he had things set up so adverbs could be added easily) bring complexity into speed-IF, and it reminded me that things are out there, where you don't have to be fancy. There are still rules to be broken the right way. In this case, it's guess-the-word, but it's robust and interesting and engaging, and it's hard to get stuck.

I'm glad I've had Danse Nocturne going in and out of my playing experiences over the years, and even if I'll never write anything like it, it guides the way for the sort of effective rule-breaking I like to see and maybe even do. It's one of those positive oddities where you say "I must know how they do this" but you don't want to know righ t away, as it spoils a bit of the fun.

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A Tale of the Cave, by Snoother
This game, though small, filks McGonagall/A poet so bad it makes us glad, May 5, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

The author told me about this game long ago and I never got around to playing it. He hasn't logged in for 5 years (since 2017) and seems to have disowned some of his early stuff, but this remains. It's a tribute to the very bad poetry of William McGonagall, which is now available in the public domain. I think I went and read it all and forgot to come back to ToC. One thing sticks with me more than any of his poems: someone claimed McGonagall would think twice about moving away from Dundee before the year 1893.

ToC is blandly titled and has little plot, and the only puzzle is an odd one, but that's appropriate, given how McGonagall's poetry itself is not especially rich, and it explores well-known rhymes and overused images. ToC is rather short and all in poetry, with very few rooms and only one real puzzle, but of course too much McGonagall could be, well, too much. At some point, we get the point, and that's that. The cadences are all in the McGonagall style, and years after reading him, I wasn't able to pick out what was original stuff by the author and what was fake. But it was all pleasant. McGonagall wasn't particularly known for his epic poems, and those that were kind of ruined the joke.

There are other, deeper poetry-based games out there, but this is amusing and a nice introduction, and I wish I'd remembered to look at ToC before the author left, so I could say thanks to him.

ToC feels like something that could be expanded a bit for other projects or for other authors (I'd love if someone did an Amanda McKitrick Ros matchup, as bad prose tends to take longer to grate than bad poetry--I believe the author may have let me know about her, too!) and there have certainly been more robust efforts. But this does the job for what it wants to be, and if the author has rejected other juvenilia, he has his reasons, but he was right to keep this up. It's a small joke but a good one.

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Barry Basic and the Quest for the Perfect Port, by Dee Cooke

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
The origins of Barry Basic, with some secondhand nostalgia, May 4, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

It's hard to capture the feeling of discovering a new programming language or system and seeing that, yes, some things you always hoped were simple are, indeed. Or that new feature is a bit different in ways you didn't expect. There's a lot of plowing through stuff and educated guessing until it works. There can only be so many ways to do it wrong, right?

That's usually not so hot in games. The plowing through stuff had better be obfuscated by an adventure, or it should be pretty short, and in BBQPP, you get both. It's a two-room game, with Barry's computer room (old BBC Micro, new ZX Spectrum) and the downstairs room where a new package has come in. So there's a bit of excitement built up here and a bit of nostalgia as well, even though I never had a Micro or Spectrum. I did have various programming books I understood progressively more of, the more I programmed them and ran them and tweaked them, and years later I was excited to a PDF-scanned version of a sequel to a childhood favorite. I'm sure Barry did the same sort of tweaking, too, though I don't think a wash-rinse-repeat in BBQPP itself would've been beneficial.

BBQPP doesn't tell you the commands to win, and while it's a guess-the-verb sort of puzzle, the verb isn't too hard to guess, and it feels like when I'm learning a programming language. I start looking for too-obscure stuff before realizing the solution was simple, and it should be, or nobody would want to move over to the cool new programming language.

The first installment of Barry Basic isn't as robust as the ones that came after it, but it wasn't supposed to be, since it was for a jam with a very specific purpose, and I believe it hit the target there without micromanaging the player. But it captured moments of discovery I remember for my youth. Perhaps it only did so because I had already played and enjoyed the two Barry Basic games (as of May 2022--cross one's fingers) that followed it and wanted just a bit more. But it did so nonetheless and reminded me I didn't need any extraordinary excitement or huge fights to have those moments. I wound up looking a lot of odd programming stuff immediately after playing it.

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The Libonotus Cup, by Nils Fagerburg

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Jolly little game where you repair your boat for a big race, January 28, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

The Libonotus Cup provided a nice break from the more serious entries which certainly had their own virtues. It's a pirate race, replete with weapons, treasure and mythical sea dangers. It's not too long, but replayable, and it has very high presentation values. While I put the web version of my game in Parchment, this goes a bit further, with custom CSS. It's a combination of JavaScript and parser and choice I didn't quite grok technically, but they're blended welll, and it's not hellishly complex. You've got a compass rose that changes to show which directions you can go...that sort of thing! It fits in great with the pirate theme, so LC never wore out its welcome with me, and I once quickly got tired of "talk like a pirate" memes and jokes.

Having the hybrid of parser and choice works well for when you have to do things with ship--you're the captain, so it might be a pain to type, say, "Have Joe tie the knots." It cuts through a lot of guess-the-verb, and it's better than the game spoon-feeding you the actions, which would make you feel less like a captain and break immersion. (Compare and contrast with Sting, where the parser does a good job of putting you in a slightly confused player-character's shoes without, well, confusing you.) and the choice options are quite nice especially when you see, okay, it would be hard to guess the verb for certain actions during the race, and at the same time, having the game spoon-feed you them would break immersion. So LC combines the best of different system, and sometimes the text of a hyperlink changes if you click it.

And if races have been done before, the puzzles are enough to make things rather interesting. You start with a damaged ship (you need new sails and a cannon) one day before the big Libonotus Cup race, and worse, Henry, the shipwright who could help you repair it, is dead drunk in a bar. Searching for a cure for drunkenness is an amusing puzzle, and it's been done before. Twice this IFComp, in fact! I wound up feeling a bit silly it took me a while until I realized there were twice the options I thought there were, and this only happened when the way forward seemed like the way back. One clue in the game text made me feel particularly silly, but it was a good one, and it fits in with the good-naturedess of the game, where even the death text and messages add nicely to the story. It's one of those "I don't want to spoil the obvious stuff. Trust me, it's funny" moments.

The race itself is fast-paced, with an emphasis more on knowing which crew member does what than on having to know, say, how precisely to tie a bowline. But given what a big chunk of the game the race is, you sort of need a bit. And contrasting Libonotus Cup's race with Sting, each captures something different–your character's more the one in charge in LC, and so I was glad they were combined together. Each also both got me googling a few terms, because it left me generally curious, and it was more about "Hey, I want to make sure I'm enjoying this fully" rather than "oh geez more studying before I understand things." The basic choices are: take risks maybe going too fast, take risks in battle, or just sail through. Err, don't rock the boat too much. Well, you know what I mean. It's clear what the big-picture choices are.

LC also has a lot more ways to fail and undo on failure (I like the explanation and GUI for undoing choice-based stuff) so that there's really no risk of messing up horribly.

Doing the arithmetic, it looks like you can buy all the best stuff if you perform a small task to get a discount on your new sails. There also seem to be several ways through other encounters. I played chicken, mostly, to survive, and I got second place. While I still have other entries to get through, my sneaky side is plotting how I might get to first. I sensed pretty clearly that some of my on-boat activites made some purchases redundant, or vice versa, and that all seems clued pretty well. Looking at the source, there are some nice surprises and funny deaths indeed. I didn't give myself the time, but I suspect players who are interested will find that time. I like the author's strategy of providing a walkthrough to get "only" second place.

With LC, I don't have much to say about it other than it's well-balanced and just a lot of fun and well thought out. It's innovative technically and well-tested, and I really like the concept of a race that takes a long while, yet manages to be packed into a relatively short game I want to revisit. Maybe I'll even use those cannons the next time through! And while I tried not to think too much about final placings in IFComp, I was happily resigned to LC bumping my entries down a place, because the fun I had was more than worth it. Other authors in our private forum agreed.

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The Golden Heist, by George Lockett and Rob Thorman

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Outfoxing Nero is, happily, as fun as you'd expect, January 27, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

I'm always a bit leery of ancient-history or mythology entries in IFComp, because I worry I'll have to know a lot about said history or mythology. Usually, though, I'm proven wrong, and GH was no exception. It deserved the high placing it got, and I'm disappointed I didn't really revisit it before posting this review.

Because this is one of those entries that you just like from the start. So many heists or heist movies rely on crazy technology or gadgets, and--well, that's the case with one of your three companions (inventor, sneak or fighter). But the focus is more on contacting your person on the inside and cashing in on favors your family gained when your father built Nero's huge decadent palace. These days, well, your fortunes are reduced. So you need to rob Nero's vaults and get out. Seems easy enough, since nobody likes Nero, but on the other hand, everyone has good reason to fear him.

Of course there are complications. This is one game I wish I'd seen sooner so I could have looked at more paths through. I can't really speak for historical accuracy, but I appreciate that they didn't take something too obscure, and they didn't put in too many gross details about Nero's legendary overindulgence. I had no clue how many characters were real and who was added for flavor. I wasn't particularly worried. Those that appeared, like the Captain of the Guard, often knew me or my companion, and I saw connections as to how they would maybe interact with others I might take in the future. And a few surprise twists made sense--there are a few once you get in the vault!

The dialogue's also very good. It could easily fall into "look at us, we're making fun of cocktail parties," but the tension of looking for the right person to say the code-phrase to helps avoid that. The misdirection and potential false positives make for quite a story, and thrown into all this is how your companion has made enemies at the party.

I took Fabricius, the inventor, and he seemed to have the right amount of "do I have to" and "you can't make me" and even pushed back when I asked for hints, which worked far better than a fourth-wall voice saying "Are you sure you want to X?" Fabricius had some crazy ideas, too, and I did so want to try them out to see how they'd fail, but then I didn't want the story to end early. Hooray for save points to revisit later. While his storyline was surreal and had an anachronism, that anachronism worked!

A scan of the game text, along with the authors' postmortem, suggests a balance to each of the three companions and how you deal with them that makes things replayable. I wish I'd spent more time doing so before this review was up, but the gist is--there are several bad ends, and you can ditch them or be ditched. Incompetence can be punished, and your choices along the way also affect what happens.

The story makes liberal use of timed text, which you can thankfully click, and I also found the music pleasant and unobtrusive. It doesn't call attention to itself, and it changes just right.

I escaped with nothing but the knowledge I'd performed a successful heist, and yet I'd had my fill of excitement and entertainment. I panicked when I had a priceless relic, because I figured I'd be arrested for just having it. I guess that is why I have to rely on games like this instead of becoming an actual criminal. GH is as impressive as its first impression, and it ended too quickly for me, which was a surprise since I played it near the end of the IFComp gauntlet and was just trying to get through all the games. That speaks to how entertaining it was for me.

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Sting, by Mike Russo

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Memories built around an unexpected nuisance, January 24, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

Sting, which I beta-tested, is a slice-of-life game that never really intrudes on you or forces you to empathize. It never portrays the autobiopgraphical character as too outgoing or too deserving of your sympathy in a harsh society, or too woe-is-me-I-was-dumb-when-younger, or whatever. The main character's sister is clearly more outgoing and than the main character. But they have a sort of bond through Sting, which explores that and how they see less of each other over time and develop their own lives, but there's still an odd fulcrum.

Perhaps what I liked most about Sting was that it had the right distance. It didn't lean in on you with a Big Message or a Story You Had to Like, but it also didn't go into trivia you felt bad not caring about. It invited me to find my own memories and not worry if they were more or less profound than the author's. This isn't always the case with autobiographical works. They can either be too flippant, or too "you need to listen up for the good of society." These still work in their own way, but with Sting, I felt encouraged to imitate it badly if need be. It took a while after testing it and writing a review in the authors' forum.

That's a general assessment, but I also don't want to spoil too much. Part of the enjoyment is the discovery of something else as you guess how the scene is going to end. The boat race is funny and navigates the terminology well (I enjoyed both finishing last and second.) It has a nice balance of giving you an idea of what's going on and not forcing you to understand the terminology. Getting a player to feel lost is a tricky business, because too much, and they hit alt-F4. I definitely didn't. There's the feel that the people you're racing with aren't going to rub it in, and you've been there before, and you'd really like to do the best you can, but you just don't have the skill, yet. Maybe one day. (There is a way to win. It requires foreknowledge of what goes on. I think I'm close to figuring it out.) It was the most interesting and involving part of Sting to me, because backing up and putting on my game designer hat, I can picture what a hash I'd make of trying to show a player-character in a chess game against someone two or three hundred points higher rated than them. The terminology would be pretty horrible. Which is a bit confusing in the boat race, but not too confusing. Your sister yells at you what to do if you mess up.

The other bits are tougher to describe without spoiling, but the first scene, where you are very young, is well done. An object disappears if you try to examine it, but it's not surreal or crazy or anything. It reminded me of a bee sting I had when very young, and how I avenged myself killing a few bees after that. Yes, it wasn't their fault. Yes, mosquitos still got to me anyway. Yes, I grew out of it.

My later memories of bees are a bit more pedestrian, too: urban legends (?) of the bee in a beer can that stung someone's throat (one more reason not to drink beer, kids!) or bees at cookouts, or even at college football tailgates, especially when my family found lots of cans to recycle at the local Alcoa plant, and then how there weren't any when we moved to Evanston, because crowds were smaller and Northwestern was stricter about litter. I even had a beehive stuck in a dryer exhaust vent outside my condo. They liked the warmth, I guess. The reader may have stories and memories, too, as bees aren't a huge nuisance, but they're there, but not enough to become pedestrian. And certainly when I see kids get upset about bees nearby, that brings back memories. Learning to deal with them took some excitement from life.

The main events work for me because a bee sting isn't quite getting insulted or breaking a bone. It's embarrassing and painful and briefly debilitating, yet not fully embarrassing or painful or inconvenient long-term. And certainly every time I get a rash, even, I think back to the only bee sting I had, as well as the near misses, and the memory of adults taking out a hornet's nest down a gravel road to a pool I loved to visit as a kid, as well as learning the difference of bees vs. hornets and being very very scared of hornets for a while!

But back to the story: you have other small motivators to push the story forward later, too, like groceries getting warm (I almost missed this! Taking the bus to my favorite discount grocer, with good sales on refrigerated/fresh goods, got a lot riskier during COVID,) and the shift from the second-last to final scene made a lot of sense when I slowed down to stop plowing through the testing.

We all have a story like this. It's one we suspect everyone has, until we talk with people and realize it's sort of unique to us. Maybe it's parades or tricycles or poison ivy or even loose nails that tear up shoes or clothes. I'm left slightly jealous that someone could have these memories organized so well, because I don't with regard to a sibling, but Sting left me to sit down and piece through how I'd make a story of my own, of things I remembered from much younger that popped up again and again. They're that profound, but they were mine. For instance, every few years I kick an exercise weight buried under a pile of clothes. Or perhaps I remember the short walk and bus trip to the vet, where I got to show off a cat or two, and that time during COVID when my bus pass expired and I had to run to the vet. And perhaps a lesser work than Sting would have gotten me close to this or made me say "I bet I have that too," but Sting made it a lot more likely. I think and hope there will be such works in IFComp in the future that won't have to compare themselves to Sting, and they won't need you to be blown away by them, but they will be very worth telling, and they'll bring back memories for me and others.

NOTE: A couple days before I revised and posted this review to IFDB, I realized there was a thread I'd seen in chess games. It's sort of my own story, but I want to tell it here, because without Sting, I might not have made the links. I'll spoiler it, for those indifferent to chess or who just want me to stick to the game. Maybe Sting will do the same for you, or your own hobbies or phobias or bugaboos.

(Spoiler - click to show)When I was looking to get my rating up to 2000, someone showed me a weapon against the Sicilian Defense. One line went (sorry, notation is unavoidable!) 1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. c3 Nf6 4. Be2 and if ...Nxe4?? 5. Qa4+! picking off the knight. I'll spare you the opening theory, but the point is, you set a few traps, and if your opponent knows them, you still don't have to face the sort of openings they can really prepare. Grandmasters wouldn't play or fear this, but then, I don't play many grandmasters.

A year later I played Ron, a chess hustler who went to my high school 20+ years before me (later Harvard--I didn't go there,) and he fell into the trap. But he started laughing and joking around and pointing out how he might be coming back and things I should watch out for. His extra pawn controlled the center! My extra piece maybe wasn't doing much! And so forth. I wondered if he was making fun of me, but we got to be friends, and he encouraged me and showed me other things.

But I gave up on chess for a long time and didn't see Ron my one college summer. In 2012 I read he'd drowned in an undertow, just offshore from his friends playing chess. And I never got to ask him if he fell into that trap on purpose. There were still a lot of lessons, from that and others, so it didn't matter, and it was fun to imagine either way. When I got back into online chess in mid-2021, I didn't want to face preparation, so I went for the system above. I guess I did the stinging--sort of. Sometimes I'd be shocked someone rated 2000 would fall into a trap and wondering if I didn't really deserve the win. Sometimes they'd bounce back, and sometimes they wouldn't. Black's center pawn mass made for an attack or tricky endgames. I even had some slip-ups where I blundered back against people rated 300 points lower. One pretty strong opponent fell into the trap twice--oops! (I've done that, too.) But no matter what happened, I saw the possibilities in the game, and I welcomed the fight, not worrying if I should be winning quickly or I deserved to cash in on the trap. It just encouraged me to take my chances better the next time I lost material early with a silly blunder, too. Or, for that matter, to bounce back better if I flaked in real life. I didn't feel too dumb or clever after the computer dissected the possibilities I missed, for better or worse. So there were a lot of wrinkles.

Ron wasn't related to me by blood. He probably did this for other people, too. But Sting helped remind me of him and that silly opening trap and pull my experiences apart to realize a few things, and it provided some closure.

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Closure, by Sarah Willson

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Clever and cute, but I'm just glad it's not TOO immersive, January 18, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

Closure is a potentially unsettling take on the whole escape-the-room genre, but it still has wisdom and humor. Your friend has just instant-messaged you for instructions to look through her ex-boyfriend's room to find a photograph of her. It's in the last place you could possibly look, of course, and along the way you and Kira learn a lot about the relationship. Using the thought bubbles as instant-message text in a parser game makes Closure stylistically pleasing, too. I wasn't surprised to learn that one person focused on the story and the other on the CSS to get things going, because both parts are well done and substantial.

This division of labor generally leads to a game that places well in IFComp and deserves to, and Closure is no exception, even if the plot may seem in the "that's something I'd never do" department. I can't say I'm comfortable with the thought of the player helping someone rummage through an ex-boyfriend's stuff, but first, I've had moments of nosiness where I didn't have the will-power about far less than a romantic interest. Also, I suspect Kira wasn't in the mood to hear "just get out, already." This could've gotten creepy fast, but I'm going to go with "friend got emotionally blackmailed into support and is trying to minimize the damage," because I think Closure does a pretty good job of establishing who's mostly at fault in the breakup. Kira, the broken-up friend, gets what she deserves for snooping around, but she's not totally humiliated.

At the end I was just sort of glad I didn't have to put up with Kira any more, but I had to admit it was a clever idea and well-executed. I may just have been put off by things a bit because I've had people who shouldn't have looked through my stuff do so and provide a really horrible justification later. But Closure does a good job of giving Kira what she deserves without going overboard on the humiliation, and that's impressive. (She's probably better off without her boyfriend, too, as we learn.)

Logically one wonders why Kira would need to call a friend to ask what to do next when searching through a room that Kira herself is in and her friend is not. But la couer a ses raisons and all that. People ask for support in weird ways, and it's not so much about the actual instructions as wanting to hear "I understand you need someone to listen" while leaving it unsaid that what they're listening to is a bit off their rocker. Of course, all Kira wants to find is a photograph. She's pretty sure it's there. It's up to the reader's imagination to figure why. And of course it's hidden, and it's a bit sad where it turns up, and Kira needs to look around just a bit more than you'd think she would. And her boyfriend TJ's new flame's name also led me to wonder if there was a Call Me Maybe style twist at the end. The main twist, to me, was that TJ was telling little white lies to Kira that you couldn't blame him for, and then he got sick of having to keep track of them as Kira began seeing inconsistencies, and, well, I sympathize with him even though I've never met him. Not that he's blameless--he moved on pretty, uh, significantly. I think we've all had people we tell little white lies to, to keep them from blowing up, and then they turn around on us and cut us down for not being truthful. And it's very good that Closure gives us TJ to empathize with, flawed though he is, to counterbalance Kira's burglary.

The fear in Closure is purely psychological. There is no potential confrontation. But Kira suffers enough embarrassment and disappointment when she realizes she hasn't been a good person. But at the end, I wondered if TJ ever looked for that photograph or even knew or cared if it was missing. However, though Kira and TJ are probably best off not looking back at each other, revisiting Closure provided me some learning moments, both from the CSS and the actual plot that reminded me of less-than-savory people I once thought I couldn't do better than.

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Dungeon Detective, by Wonaglot, Caitlin Mulvihill

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Upside down and straightforward at the same time, January 13, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Some IFComp entries give you a "why didn't anyone do this sort of thing before" feel, and Dungeon Detective definitely falls into this category. It espouses no great philosophical views or breakthroughs, and while well laid-out, it's not super technically proficient. But it is a smooth, fun experience, with amusing characters, and I'm glad of all the bases it covered.

You, as a gnoll with somewhat broken English, offer your detective skills to a dragon who is worried treasure is missing. They have enough, of course. Dragons aren't greedy, at least not in the game-world. But they want things to be safe for others that dwell in the dungeon. You look through for clues and rumors, and there are five pieces of evidence that you need in order to nail down the perpetrators' identities. None of this is too esoteric or demanding, and the exploration feels just about right. There's no grinding for experience or anything, either, and DD even tracks the clues you've found so far, so you don't have to.

The end result, when the dragon interrogates you about your findings, is satisfying whether the dragon's convinced or not. They are a sporting type, so even if you mess up, nothing horrible happens to your character.

DD is the sort of game that could've been overwritten easily and beaten the joke to death. But it is also not underwritten. It hits at a lot of neat points. Whether or not you get the joke before officially solving the case, there are good laughs to be had. It's all well-constructed, and I think I played a post-comp version so I didn't encounter the bugs earlier reviewers reported. It's one of those entries where you have a relatively simple joke that won't baffle people, but it has enough side passages that it's legitimately fulfilling, and it's not just a joke.

I worry I potentially spoiled the experience with what I've written. But I don't think it's totally spoiled. I can't be the only person glad 1) that it exists and 2) that it was done well and got the expected laughs and then some. As someone who'd be exhausted if I went in for super-deep philosophy all the time but doesn't like vacuous entertainment, I found DD fit my needs well.

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The Dead Account, by Naomi Norbez

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Death, social media, and burial in/by social media, January 8, 2022
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

The Dead Account closes some of the loose ends for Weird Grief (WG), the author's other entry in IFComp 2021. You work at HiveKind, a social media network, and it has algorithms to detect if a member has died. A new update means their accounts must be closed and deleted. It's your first account, and it's pretty straightforward. The closed account, you-the-reader soon find, is Mike, whose funeral kicks off WG.

Through a list of chat logs we see people asking why Mike hasn't responded to their latest text. He's usually good about it. We find out how Mike dies, and the characters get closure for his untimely death.

I'm curious how I would've reacted if I hadn't played WG first. Learning about Mike's lifestyle later would, I hope, not have mattered. But TDA answered some questions: why Mike died, how people miss him, and what the fallout is. And it deals with some issues I've long thought about. I'd like to leave something cool on the Internet. Are my games enough? Are those game guides I wrote for my favorite Apple games enough? And how do we deal with people dying?

It wasn't a huge problem at first. But it will be as time goes by. It was certainly sad to me that Mike's death coincided with the new policy so soon after. And certainly I can empathize with the characters needing to talk to Mike. I've left comments on social media platforms to people who've probably long since left. I don't expect a response back, of course. I just need to say it, and maybe followers paying attention will be reminded of or discover someone pretty neat. Or if something pops up on Twitter saying someone lost their pet or, worse, someone they love, I leave a like. It's just important.

As for Mike himself? He's special in his circle of friends but not Someone Super Special. He's not especially brilliant. He seems to deserve a memorial, though. And I think most people at HiveKind or wherever would like to keep them up, because they will have friends they lost. Yet at the same time, disk space is finite, even as technology improves. There's going to be an upper limit, even as disk space gets cheaper. And it's not practical to resurrect stuff like GeoCities. What do we do then? This isn't as critical an issue as, say, how overpopulation may drain the Earth's resources, but it's impossible not to care about a bit. You feel as though the characters should have something, and even though they could make up their own MikeBot, it wouldn't be nearly the same as pinging his HiveKind account when they knew he wouldn't respond.

The closest I've come to this is having to get pictures from my old PhotoBucket account. I kept getting "MANAGE YOUR ACCOUNT OR LOSE YOUR PICTURES" messages. Some pictures were ten years old. I was able to download everything quickly and efficiently, just as the characters in the story got 24 hours to download chat messages to remember Mike. But I also kept getting the MANAGE YOUR ACCOUNT message even after I signed up for and canceled a membership. It took Photobucket backing off before I was finally able to hit delete for good. They were on my hard drive, but I still wanted them Out There.

TDA brought up these disturbing issues without rubbing your face in them and certainly reminded me of the things I really wanted to do. And while I wish there would've been more of a story around the moderator who made their decision whether to follow policy, I think the author is within their rights to keep the focus on Mike's circle of friends.

TDA is one of those entries where you don't have a lot to say, as Getting All Literary ruins the point. You realize these are things you think about, and these are things people quite unlike you (such as, for me, the characters in WG and TDA) think about. You're glad others do, even though they're uncomfortable. It makes other thoughts easier to face as well and removes the "I might be weird for thinking this, but ..." overhead from some of our tougher thoughts. There are plenty of entries in IFComp that give us what we wanted, and we should not begrudge them. Some, like TDA, finger stuff we didn't know we wanted to discuss, or we just forgot.

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extraordinary_fandoms.exe, by Storysinger Presents

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Friends + Learning CSS = healing and growth, December 31, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

EFE in the big picture can be tied up pretty quickly. It's a story about someone who finds friends and relief on a Discord server. They learn to code. They become a part of something. Their life takes a big jump. The different dialogue choices seems trivial. If you're worldly wise and cynical, it's all a bit too simple. And yet it works. Maybe it would wear out its welcome if I read more like it, but as of now, I can take it for what it is, and certain parts resonated with me. A lot of times I caught myself saying "No, no, it's all more complex than that." Strictly speaking, yes. But then, the voice that said that was partially influenced by Authority Figures (including a few younger than me) from way back when, who muddied things on purpose and who didn't let me enjoy small victories. They were melodramatic and oversimplified in their own way, which was far worse. And EFE helped me push back on that, so I'm glad it's there.

It's presented as a sequence of brief chats where pinecone logs into a Discordant chat server, introduces themselves, hits it off with other fans of C-Project, which is a totally fictitious anime, and begins doing some role playing and offers to help with what is a pretty downtrodden wiki. They doesn't know coding, but others are happy to help them learn. Pinecone doesn't know everything about CSS and thus makes makes oversights, and that's okay. This was probably the part that hit most for me, because my experience with coding was first, learning BASIC, and then feeling guilty I wanted to learn about graphics or other neat stuff to make games instead of the Real Stuff that Pushed Research Forward and Took Advantage of Given Opportunities. I remember being in a summer program after 8th grade where other kids and I learned Pascal, and the instructor was noticeably cool on me wanting to just make branching-story games. Even back then there was a lot of one-upmanship, of bragging about what they knew without passing the knowledge on, of playing both sides of the coin: "Boy! This is hard! I must be smart to figure it out!" and "Boy! How'd you not know that? I know that! Everyone knows that!" It's nowhere near the abuse Pinecone suffers, of course, but it is there, and it's unnecessary, and those CSS guru-ing sessions worked well for me as a reader and person. I'm glad it's out there, and I'm a bit jealous I missed out on it.

It never struck me that the "accelerated" class and competition were, in fact, inadequate for my needs, because it wasn't just about helping you get ahead, but about competition, and the people at the bottom got looked down on. Pinecone gets that every day from their father. So I can relate. For me it was just a "fun" summer program and a high school class that left me thinking I wasn't a "real" coder. It persisted through college when I learned HTML on my own but felt I didn't have the passion for real programming that other students in the computer lab did. And later when part of code reviews, I was unable to disassociate the jostling for power and "haha look what you did wrong" or "You DO know THIS, right? EVERYBODY knows this!" or "this is easy, easy enough you better not ask me again if you forget" from legitimate "hey, look how to do this" or "hey, let's throw in some details." It's not easy to blend just showing someone cool stuff with pushing them forward, and while EFE doesn't explore this rigorously, it does establish that role-playing, etc., can lead to people wanting to learn to code, and no, that code doesn't have to be super-abstract or impressive, and part of learning to code is, in fact, learning what shortcuts people ahead of you took and which ones worked for you. There's a parallel with making friends: some people act as though it is very hard to make real, good friends. It is, in a way. But people who act like coding or friendship is a series of trials they deserve to dish out to others? Well, that's not abuse, but it's certainly not a good thing.

And Pinecone seems to be learning to accept this. While I think there were too many choices that were too-similar, having a few, especially between plain thanks and "gee, really, wow" established that Pinecone is the sort of person who worries over choices that don't make a difference, because they can't help it. Perhaps if they said something different, their parents would've behaved better. Really, Pinecone should pay more attention to their own family! Of course, when Pinecone needs to say something different, it had better not be TOO different, because that gets you looked at funny, or whatever. We've all had people who played these mind games, where we just have to say the right thing, but we have no chance. And it gets in the way of accepting situations devoid of such mind games. Some, I found hard to accept at first, or if I stuck with them, I rationalized why they wouldn't last. Pinecone is able to accept this in the end. I've learned to, too. It seems to be fertile ground for a lot of stories, and I wish EFE would have explored it a bit more.

One thing I want to add–I usually hate timed text, but it works well here. So often in twine it feels like an implicit "Hey! Listen up! No, you can listen up better than THAT," but here, it signifies a legitimate break when Pinecone disconnects from Discordant and probably doesn't want to, but real life must take over for a bit. As the story goes on, I wondered what sort of awfulness Pinecone's parents were up to each time Pinecone logged off.

The result was a work that didn't get in my personal space telling me whom I have to sympathize and why. In fact, it's nice to picture Pinecone learning how to deal with personal space and not worry about getting in others', both implicitly and with any creative works. It still gave me something to write about: here and for my own private journals. I got some good snarky lines in at people that don't remember me. I wrote stuff about learning coding that doesn't belong here. The main thing? Just knowing that "simple" games do, indeed, work, and you don't have to be a super-brilliant coder to make others' lives better, makes me happy. I don't necessarily need a super behind-the-scenes look. I just still appreciate the affirmation that not really being able to get stuff done around certain people isn't my fault. Like the guy in the accelerated summer class who got called "Yes, Sir, Mr. Studly Aaron, Sir." No, I wasn't lazy or jealous of his brilliancy. Yes, I'm kind of glad I forgot his last name so I can't Google it.

So my take-away is that the fandom itself isn't extraordinary, though Pinecone's jump in life quality is pretty phenomenal when given something like normalcy. Pinecone seems to have learned that sort of interaction shouldn't be seen as extraordinary. Perhaps the work is too black-and-white about abusive parents and a supportive teen social group and how quickly things can change. Perhaps I'm jealous I never had that fully supportive teen group. Let's just say there were oddities in my family life, and kids in the Smart Classes said "boy, in case you're not lying, you're dumb to sit there and accept that. Oh, also, shut up and be grateful for advanced classes." Or it's too optimistic, about the turnaround Pinecone's friends help her achieve, and Things Don't (Usually) Work That Way. Yes, there are probably diminishing returns to scale if I would read too many similar works. Yes, reading too many might put me in a dreamland that prevents me from doing stuff.

But it is worth finding a work, or a community, that hits that sweet spot just when you got cynical, where you seem to be good at something and it feels like it's no big deal, but it is, to other people. It is believable, far more than the standard "if you believe it, you can achieve it" melodramas with a rags-to-riches story. Someone quite simply finds acceptance, acceptance most of us think we need, but we figure it's not enough. Here, it is. Pinecone finds a niche and doesn't worry about who has more Programming Experience Points or whatever. Maybe Pinecone never takes on super-big projects or reaches the top. But Pinecone finds acceptance and peace. And even though I felt EFE may have cut corners or left something out (maybe for a sequel, perhaps, when the author has had more time to reflect on things,) I want to label it as a Good Thing well worth looking through for someone who feels blocked from learning new coding. Yes, it felt too general at times, and I felt the author may've holding back the sort of important details that are hard to write down. Perhaps exploring Pinecone's doubt more, or what their parents would think of such a project, or Pinecone fixing other stuff they missed, would be a good idea for a follow-up work.

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Flattened London, by Carter Gwertzman

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
An uplifting volume, December 30, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021 extras

Flattened London, from the cover and title, provides a mashup of Flatland and Fallen London. It's far more the second than the first, going in more for a Zork I-style treasure hunt, replete with treasure chest to dump stuff in, than any sort of mathematical theory or knowledge. I have to admit I was hoping for the first, but I wasn't disappointed with the second. The items you must find are suitably odd and droll and entertaining, and so it kept my interest quite well. You will probably enjoy it if you go in looking for adventure and not abstract enlightenment. That's not to say it's mathematically illiterate--lines like "Eight candles form an image of a cube" work quite will.

It does seem to have everything: a world through a mirror, a river of death where you play chess, and a mystery and near-conspiracy theories about the third dimension, which is still a touchy subject. And it has good laughs, too. But for pure-puzzle enthusiasts, you may want to know that a lot revolves around finding the right books to read and then following or interpreting instructions--even for the chess! Mapping is a moderate challenge, though it's fun to see the full world being built and all the odd locations. In one case, there's a MasterMind style puzzle. It's more about the story than anything else. And it has some mathy puns in that will make you groan happily.

So if you don't want to approach the trickiness of, say, deriving the Quadratic Formula, then FL will probably appeal. You start off as an equilateral triangle (classes aren't played up as strongly in FL,) and you visit Mr. Pages, a bookseller who wants a book. Clearly for collection purposes--or is it? You seem to have to visit some pretty odd places, including some through a mirror which provide you transport to a flipside. I'm not clear on precisely how the mirror works, but you can only enter it in some places, and it's a handy device for getting out of areas with no way back. It feels just a little illicit, especially as you help others use it before you finally have cause to, yourself.

Things get more illicit with a summoning ceremony, too. To get there, you'll need to go through a maze and navigate some seedy polygons with various different sides, even bringing two together for a common purpose. Many descriptions are funny. There's a very bad painting that hides something obvious after a puzzle is already completed, and it's a nice touch. The different endings for the different hats (there's more than one per hat) you choose at the beginning make things click, too--each profession has a different reason why understanding the third dimension would be useful. And the ending command, well, I can't spoil it, and even if you guess it, it's fully appropriate.

Perhaps one problem with FL is that you may be overwhelmed by a huge inventory--part of that is ameliorated by how only certain items fit in the trophy case (it'd be nice to have a scoring mechanism, even just "1 of 13," to give you an idea of progress, as well as some foreshadowing by your trophy case that this isn't just a treasure hunt.) And the game tries to destroy certain items that are no longer useful. But inventory munging does add a degree of discomfort to an otherwise entertaining and robustly whimsical affair.

And it is a lovely combination of nonsense and speculation that could've fallen apart quite easily. While I had trouble remembering certain hows and whys on multiple play-throughs, I did play through it more than once. And if it is more Fallen London than Flatland, and I played it more for the second, the fun is very real and a good Fallen London advertisement, even as fan-art, for noninitiates. It's the sort of imagination that makes me feel at home, and it doesn't try too hard to be odd. If you wonder and hope it is for you, it is. I didn't find my enjoyment ruined by having to go to a walkthrough.

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D'ARKUN, by Michael Baltes

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
atmospheric mystery/horror game in Dialog, December 30, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

As D'ARKUN combines horror and mystery, which are two of my least preferred genres, I'll mention I still enjoyed it, because it gave me several good chances to. I'll tackle the programming side first. On realizing D'ARKUN was, in fact, in Dialog, I realized it was the first Dialog game I played. I had clear chances, since others have appeared in IFComp. I left my first run-through thinking "Wow! How did the author do that?" to some parts I found unusually smooth. Now the programming side is well more than competent. It certainly gave me ideas of stuff to do in Inform. And I think Dialog uses very well the information of what programmers need and use from the Z-machine, as well as more data on what players find improves their own experience. So Dialog and such aren't bound to support arcane ways of doing things just because Infocom did it that way, when maybe Infocom only did it that way due to hardware limitations. Hooray, progress!

But there's neat stuff which the author seems to deserve credit for. The big boost I saw in D'ARKUN was the "find" command, which helps make a big in-game world such as D'ARKUN feel much more accessible. FIND X moves you to X's location, if you can make it there. This is something I implemented as a debug command in some games, but it was tricky, and it felt smooth here. It even rejected my attempts when I dropped climbing gear needed to bridge gaps or travel between towns. This all set the table for a much more pleasant experience than I feared, but it would have been good in Inform as well.

D'ARKUN takes place in a small set of villages near the north tip of what was formerly East Germany–a great spot for an obscure, distant cult to take hold and go about their business for years without anyone noticing. You generally ride your bike between them – I'd have liked maybe a menu or shortcuts here so I didn't have to type "ride to altenkirchen," but I did enjoy not having to do this too much. Though I was maybe sort of hoping for nudges to say, okay, you spent enough time here.

After a good competent start on my part, I went to the walkthrough very early on this one. Enough was signposted in the game and not the walkthrough that I enjoyed reading the auxiliary materials that popped up to give atmosphere. They provided stronger atmosphere than some passive verb construction during action sequences ("some hands are grabbing you") – which looks like a translation thing that's easily fixed. And I think sometimes it was hard to follow the why's of the walkthrough. I had to search instead of look at a lot of things. HINT mentions this, but still, it was a bit of a nuisance to me and one of the relics of ancient text adventures that is on the author and not Dialog.

The puzzles that appeared were not super-esoteric. A lot revolved around using the climbing gear judiciously. But stuff like mixing the right liquid for the final bit felt like trial and error. Still, once I dropped down into the final tomb-ish area that there seemed no way back from, it was appropriately creepy, and the escape was believable. The bad guy was, indeed, bad (a variant on "What you think is evil is actually power you're just too scared to use" that always seems to be effective) and information along the way built up to who he was and what he was trying to do. Diaries scattered around also gave me an idea of past events, and perhaps the most interesting part for me was a chair you could sit in for a psycholgogical evaluation, which was simultaneously creepy and useful.

I'm at a loss to say too much about mystery/horror games, as I don't really grok their conventions and so forth. Other reviewers note D'ARKUN is even more in the Anchorhead vein than I'd guessed, while still being its own game. I can't say, because I haven't played Anchorhead--in fact, Cragne Manor with a walkthrough was enough for me! But D'ARKUN plus a walkthrough (even one that doesn't get all the points) worked as a positive experience for me, as an outsider. The password-protected PDF, of a map you unlock on your second day (D'ARKUN uses sleeping after performing tasks as a way to provide chapter breaks of a sort,) is a neat way to make sure people don't spoil too much too quickly. I did find the light-requiring puzzles tricky given the time you could keep the lamp lit. I wound up save-and-restoring, even with the refill I found later. But they weren't too bad, and I was able to accept not seeing a lot of the game beyond the walkthrough that got you half the points. I had some idea of places I hadn't explored, and the ending was satisfying enough.

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Taste of Fingers, by V Dobranov

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Once you get it, ... eyowch!, December 30, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

If you may need to play something through twice, it's best if 1) it's relatively short and 2) it gives you clear alternate paths through and 3) it's rewarding to play through, because you see something you couldn't have expected to the first time. ToF is three for three here. Simple arithmetic makes it clear that re-reading through is constructive: at two critical points, you get to choose two of three memories for a tourist/businessman (their business seems more than a bit shady) in China to follow, then the story pushes forward. So if you say "Wait, what?" to the story at the end, as I did, the next time through, you can stabilize with one of the memories you've seen, then push forward with one you haven't. I was going a bit fast. So this was, in fact, an effective way to tell me: hey, look again, you missed some clues. I did.

ToF, ostensibly at first about zombies the narrator sees on a trip to China, has a twist. The person is revealed to be less than saintly. They are holed up. They know they can't go outside. Then the viewpoint switches to quasi-military personnel hunting down a rather big zombie in a coffee shop ... and we can assume the original narrator is that zombie, and they saw the personnel in their Hazmat suits as zombies of a sort, because they do look alien. We learn there's a virus that turns only certain ethnicities into zombies.

This would have felt ripped from the headlines in 2020 or this year, but it was apparently written a few years before. I certainly didn't need this sort of scare about how COVID could be worse (my basic fear was it would mutate into something more contagious like, well, the Delta or Omicron variant.) And, in a way, COVID has targeted a certain sort of person through misinformation. Thankfully hospital staff aren't and don't have to be as ruthless as the exterminators in the story, but there's obviously a toll on them or a temptation to think "this person asked for it." I've certainly long since grown weary of schadenfreude stories about "hey! This idiot promoted misinformation on Facebook, and COVID killed them!" The main character in ToF, it must be said, is worse than average.

Seeing a new vector for how awful COVID could be is, of course, not the sort of uplifting thing anyone's clamoring for right now. But it seems like a logical and nontrivial extension of how the next COVID could be worse, and other passages reminded me of where I can't visit and how and why, and ... well, quite bluntly, I'm glad I'm not the only one having worries, and sometimes when someone else puts their own worries into writing so well, it at least stops the vagueness. There've been all sorts of things COVID has cut short or made annoying: for instance, making the choice to eat something I am missing an ingredient for, or finally getting to not-waste a grocery purchase I made, instead of actually going to the store. And even when at the store, worrying about people who would not wear masks and ignored the one-way signs (bonus points for cell phone yammering) and thus raise more unnecessary risks. Again, the narrator is far, far worse, and the examples I cite are not worth getting worked up on a personal level, but ... too many people are like the narrator, and their petty actions may increase the risk all around. ToF's narrator, with his need for adventure despite what must've been frequent and obvious warnings, reminded me of that. It was worryingly pleasing to see him meet his fate at the hands of soldiers who were, conveniently, just doing their jobs, but they sure had fun doing the parts that would put most of us off.

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How the monsters appeared in the Wasteland, by V Dobranov

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Very quick and effective, December 30, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

The author, like me, put two entries into IFComp this year. I think I see eye to eye with their methodology, too: don't make anything too long, because there will be more than enough entries, and you don't want to hog the oxygen. Let people revisit if they're interested. And I was, and I was glad to have something not in my genre(s) energize me for the next few entries. They've done well to present everything clearly and not leave any loose ends, except for the ones you need to chase down to find a few interesting details, and the translation is strong. On my first reading through, I thought "Why isn't it WHEN the monsters...?" but on re-reading, I get it. There's a bit of sleuthing to do, because you're not spoon-fed everything. It's that sort of entry that has a bit of everything, even up to causing tension without having any way to get you killed.

It seems HtmaiW is intentionally light on aesthetic details, and I think that's the right choice, because listing the technical specs of whatever armored vehicle you're using to transport the goods, as well as the how and why, would take away from the emotional punch. You are mercenaries doing a job. You don't have a lot of time for the technical stuff. You just have to make sure the power works. And at the start, it doesn't work well. Lights flicker. The fridge compartment's power is flaking, and your orders are to keep the cargo cool–which leaves various macabre suggestions as to what the cargo IS, and why it needs to be moved from the Enclave to the Citadel. It's a weapon, of sorts.

And very quickly, after the first repairs, you realize WHY this run may be so tricky. Nomads want to either steal or destroy your cargo. Again, both possibilities are workable, and your conversation with your android, uh, co-worker, Doho gives a sense of urgency. Yes, you need to fix that door in your vehicle that's on the blink. No, you don't have a lot of time. The vehicle isn't super-huge, but it's big enough to know this is serious business. The player's unfamiliarity with the GUI (well-presented as it is) also contributes to the tension when Doho exhorts you to hurry up. Doho's like that throughout.

And after you shoot down a few stray nomads, you get overwhelmed. Doho, being an android, sees things quite level-headedly up to the end. And it's his physical head you need to preserve, as you need to do certain things to ensure your own safety. This is a good creepy way of giving the player instructions without a full instruction sheet. You know what to do, but you're worried about Doho, even though he's irrelevant in the big picture and knows it. I certainly experienced some fear of "what if I arrived at the Citadel without even Doho's head, with the memory card in it."

Through all this, no mention of monsters, though probably some monstrous behavior and leadership contributed to the whole situation. You just can't call the monsters ... that. And of course, when they appear, they make sure you're safe from the nomads attacking you. It's unclear to me whether Doho predicted the monsters would destroy your potential captors, but either way, they're not the sort of entities to care about memory chips in an android's head.

I was able to escape, and I don't think there's much more, though I had lingering feelings something was missed. I suppose I could not have stopped the monsters from spreading, and I wound up not getting killed, but not much more. I'm curious if I could've done more. I feel like I missed something. Maybe I wanted to do more with or for Doho, or I expected to do more with the toolbelt, which had an interesting interface where links changed colors when you examined it. But HtmaiW was effective even before that. For all the Bad Things that it implies happen behind the scenes, it's the sort of entry that clearly adds to IFComp and won't bog a lot of people down, even if they get stuck fiddling with some mechanics. That's part of the game. It doesn't intimidate you with importancy, but it definitely provides a quick rush. And it has some nice touches, such as small passages in Arabic you can just google-translate, or a choice between Russian and English text, where later the English version gets some Russian text. This just made me smile.

So I think it's well worth a visit. And it definitely feels like there could or even should be a sequel.

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Fine Felines, by Felicity Banks

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Many meaningful choices, no bad endings. Oh, cat pictures, too., December 30, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

I worried about failing to do full due diligence in replaying Fine Felines before sending my final IFDB review. It's not the game's fault, or if it is, it's in the most positive way possible. I just simply didn't want to breed the cats wrong on purpose. And yes, Fine Felines is about a year of breeding cats. Your life's fullness depends on how well you breed them and interact with others. Fortunately, there are no bad endings. But that didn't stop me from worrying about it, having owned a few cats. Fortunately, I read the helpful documentation/cheat sheet, and that started me looking into things. All I can do is say that I read through the source. And I'm glad the author added more breeds for a post-comp version. I think Fine Felines more than served a great purpose as a boost when there were games in genres that weren't especially my thing, the darker-themed ones. So it qualified as a "good-citizen" game, which I define as one that doesn't suck up much oxygen and does much like many shorter games, but it was the only long game to really do so. Which is impressive. I remembered things well once I started looking through the source.

Getting through all the IFComp games is tough, and you need to pace yourself, and I put off reviewing FF largely because I figured I would hit a rut, and it would bring me out, and it did. And it's far more than just cat pictures and even getting to name the kittens your cats breed, if you want. Of course, you can do that. And here I'll add some personal history: I can't say I know much about cat breeding, because my first cats came from a barn in northeast Iowa. One was scared of me for a day before jumping on my computer hard drive tower. Another showed over the years he would obviously have made a terrible barn cat, because he had no interest in fighting. Another, well, the barn owners' daughter brought him in, then they threw him back once she left for college, and he wound up sort of clinging to me when I got the chance at another cat. I heard "why'd you choose HIM?" and wondered, myself, as spent five minutes screaming inside a cage on the short drive back. Then after an hour he went and sat with with my other cat.

And one thing COVID ruined was being able to go out and just see cats for adoption at PetSmart or wherever. Seeing all these cats without any breed actually put me in a position where I prefer non-bred cats, because there are so many out there that just need homes, and comparing what people pay here to the $100 adoption fee is a bit of a shock. Breeding cats isn't big in the USA, certainly not as big as breeding dogs. But I wanted to see a few cats and have something more than just pictures, and I got that with Fine Felines. If it's not full spiritual renewal, it stopped the erosion in a big way.

At the start, your mother has died and left you $10000. You decide to invest that in a business. You have a choice of what sort of materials to choose. I went with most expensive, and everything worked okay. I didn't quite run out of money. But, of course, I (and my in-game character) didn't know anything about cat breeding, so I had to ask. And I wound up having to navigate a neighbor who didn't like cats as well as three people willing to help me get started. I confess I hoped for cat pictures as I asked around.

There's also a revealed diagnosis of fibromyalgia, which brought up more memories than you'd think. I still remember having knee surgery and hearing "What are you doing with crutches? You can walk! Are you just trying for attention?" or even bringing them to the athletic center to do rehabilitation and occasionally getting funny looks or comments. Or maybe feeling guilty moving weights up on a leg machine and still using crutches. So the part discussing where people say "you don't need a wheelchair! You're not really handicapped!" resonated with me--I've also received my share of "don't be grouchy" style encouragement, and the main character would certainly have that since raising cats is unpredictable, and that variance is something you may think about even if you're not officially on the job. So the main character has many such variables, and it's not melodramatic in-game. While they can only be dealt with on a basic level due to IFComp's two-hour time constraints, the way they're presented beat the stuffing out of the standard "ACHIEVE YOUR DREAMS" lecture.

So I went through and got a good ending, or one that seemed good, but they are all good in a way. The standard "if you like this sort of thing, you'll like it" praise applies here. And while I didn't replay this on my computer as much as other entries, I probably replayed it more in my head. But my an intellectual interest in finding "bad" endings got short-circuited here, as having owned cats made it much harder for me to make a Clearly Bad Decision. My heart wanted there to be no real way to mess up, but my head said "The more meaningful decisions, the better!" Similarly, my head enjoys games or problems where being a nice person is not enough, but here, my heart wouldn't want that. I mean, enough money for food and such, yay. I have a problem with trying out simulations of deliberate neglect of animals as opposed to, say, being a jerk to other people in your next playthrough, and I'm glad FF avoided that while still dealing with real-life issues. I'm also glad it didn't drag things out. One simulated year was more than enough to make me happy and steel me for far darker-themed games still in my IFComp bucket, both when I was writing reviews in the authors' forum and when I was touching them up for IFDB. It was legitimate spiritual renewal.

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Universal Hologram, by Kit Riemer

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Pain of loss/scrambling for survival in a sim, same/different as real life, December 30, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

UH was tough for me to get to replay. I thought it was mainly due to the snark of the main character, as well as Ged, the person encouraging you to act so everything doesn't go down the drain. Ged cusses sometimes. A few cuss words are nothing in the face of mass extinction, I got it, or I thought I did. This doesn't change how I enjoyed the meat of the game, or what I thought. The most amusing parts to me weren't the direct jokes but when the game stood back and let me think about things. Okay, yeah, I could pull back from the game any time, because I am a person with free will, and the game is just an HTML file with graphics and sound. But the pacing was organized well enough that you'd have a hub and branches, and the hub was pretty clearly a Good Place to Sit and Think of Things. Perhaps UH was too heavy on snark at times, which is okay. But it didn't rely on snark. It did other things to establish a Futuristic Tone, like having about/credits explicitly listed metadata. So I knew what I was getting into. But on reflection, I saw a theme of loss throughout the game, of worlds we dreamed up and let die, and how having someone in our created world keep it alive is, of course, an extreme exception.

You start out on Mars. Humans have moved here long ago, leaving behind a doomed Earth. There are pyramids of information, some practical and some not, and you've been chosen, for whatever reason, to look into them and find something. You're given a multiple-choice quiz you can cheat on, with easy undos, and it seems it's more of a way to catch you-the-player up on what's happening. Often, only one or two choices aren't ridiculous. The quiz to some extent establishes a theme: with all that technology, the witty repartee feels mechanical (responding "was that the first question?" to "Are you ready for the quiz?" is an example.) This pops up later, when you start analyzing the best social responses in a situation, ones most people would quickly choose either way, e.g. polite white lies or overbearing, overstated truth.

Because, as you find out, you're in a simulation. In fact, you are in U9, a very deep simulation, below U8 and so on. So it makes sense that, that far away from humanity, some of your emotions become quantified to some degree, and natural actions, such as deciding whether to tell your friend they look great or awful, become rigorous show-your-work-a-thons. I think it's no mistake that there is no real humor from your point of view, no "oh, that's neat because X," only comebacks.

After a few more evaluations, you find out you may be able to astral-project, and you find your quest. Your world is likely to be deleted. Nobody uses the information from your world any more or cares. Besides, you wouldn't understand stuff like soccer. You just wouldn't. Trust me, the overseeing computer says. It's not worth asking about. You've had a good run, no offense, but it takes work to upkeep, and you do understand your own self-interest may be adjusting your calculations? You and Ged both, really. Ged particularly adamant things should be saved. He provides actual reasons.

If you accept the challenge, you're sent forward into the real world (U0 or U1–I forget) to take a box with your world in it away from the people who are about to destroy it. Even if you succeed, things are irrevocably changed. You probably don't want to go back. And sort of like Narnia, the time you spent away is nothing compared to how time passed below, but unlike Narnia, there are no allegories or talking animals or aesthetic places to explore or wonder. Because, well, simulations are a dime-a-dozen. And I think UH meant not to give too many details, because it wanted to emphasize that even people in badly created or imagined worlds have a world and belong there, and it's the only one they've got. The semi-random, deliberately imperfect, odd graphics seem to reinforce this.

I think I got tripped up on some terminology and some science-fiction conventions, and when I kind of rolled my eyes at the swearing and snark, it probably cost me some Comprehension Points. So I didn't get as much out of this as I could. But there were still more than enough takeaways. The erasure scenes are very good, if you tell Ged to get lost. Given your character's snarky contrarian bent, it feels a little dirty of the game not to give you the chance, or force you to undo a lot. I'd have appreciated, once the game was over, a way to revisit the critical checkpoints and branches to see what happened if I messed up elsewhere. And certainly the whole "we're in a simulation" thing reminds me of all the times I played a game to somewhat-lose to see what was going on. All the people I killed with my decisions, this time through, all the simulations I aborted because I wasn't interested, with no Ged to save things remotely! Even the worlds I created in my head, whether with Legos or a computer program (e.g. The Sims) or even purely mentally, I imagine them drying up and sort of hoping they could save themselves somehow--of course nobody in there has free will or emotions--but I'd like them to live on. While UH kind of crushed me with all the mental worlds I'd created and left behind to shrivel, it also provided a story as to how they could keep going. So it was more to me than standard OMG YOU'RE IN A SIMULATION.

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Dr Horror's House of Terror, by Ade McT

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Worth it, though I almost put it down for good, December 26, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

The title isn't joking around here. It gives you a clue that there is a lot of horror, and it may be overdone on purpose, but there is a point to it all. The problem with this is that one image or passage is probably not going to go down well for you. This is far from fatal, and I don't know how that can be helped. All I can say is, the bad guys are exposed as bad in the end. Because this was the game I most had to sit myself down to play. Others, my mind wandered. Here, I wanted my mind to wander. But there were rewards.

What, then, got me nervy? (Spoiler - click to show)You kill someone innocent in the game, rather early on. It made me get up and walk around a bit. It’s all there to establish what a bad person you are and how much you’ll do to gain power. But it’s there. And it quickly changed the tone, for me, from a light-hearted, silly "look how messed up bad movies can be" into other things. Yes, it’s supposed to be over the top. Yes, you may be the surprise-twist bad guy. That’s the point. Everyone’s revealed at the end to be awful, power-and-fame-grubbing people. But, hoo boy. One of the implements of death, well, might offend religious sensibilities. Perhaps people more comfortable with horror tropes can cast it aside. Part of the joke seems to be that you, a bumbling actor, get worse along the way to power. Knowing the author is a good person and a strong writer, I think this is the right explanation.

Maybe I felt ambushed by the gore, though, because the game does seem to go full-scale joke at the first required command. It's a pitch-perfect well-clued guess-the-verb that gives an idea of who you are. Then, after being called to Arnie, the director's, office, you discover that a cult is backing the whole production, and later, you find the big-shot actors also playing a role on-set are not quite as they seem. It goes well beyond needing makeup or a hairpiece. Along the way, you gain your first points, too. SCORE doesn't just give a numerical total but a list of "horror movie themed" things you did to avoid perilous situations, which mostly involve running away or, later, not letting someone else run away once your inventory's at full strength.

Enough strategic running away lets you make forward progress to Studio 5 (yes, there are four others) to see your first task. The actors are involved with that, and you not only need to gain their favor but also need an additional item for protection, which you can only get from killing the security guard. Security guards pop up throughout the game. They scold you and kick you to the studio lot without ever hurting you, so you see how it can be disturbing that you may need to deal harshly with one. There is a definite Chekhov's Gun lying around. I felt guilty considering doing what I needed to do. But I did it. And a part of me still felt, boy, it's pretty annoying to have to HIDE from the security guard for the fifth time. It'd be nice to get rid of them and get on with solving the puzzle.

Yes, there are five studios, each with a theme. Each brings you a phalanx you will need to defeat your executive director's evil cultish plans. The puzzles for all this work technically. The best one is where you have to summon and banish ghosts to create a sub-story by itself. This could be trial-and-error, but it's pretty clear who has to go where, and the locations also have clues. The outline of a body suggests a murder. And so forth. The build-a-monster one, while not as emotionally effective, signposted the pieces I needed, and then there was some thinking about how to tie them together. There's another one where you have to force someone who's scared of animals somewhere. I thought the English pub scene was the weakest, but it was still pretty good. The big basic types of horror movies are covered here: building a monster, giant predatory animals, and so forth. This was all well thought out, and there are a lot of good laughs leading up to the final fight scene, where you defeat evil. Of course, you don't exactly have a holy army behind you.

The final scene ... well, if I have to poke the author about something, it'd be to streamline the parser so you don't have to type in so much. Use abbreviations. Because it's a neat bit of five-on-five fighting, with different army groups pitted against each other. Then the surviving ones fight, and so forth. There are several possible outcomes here, but I found it amusing to compare aligning who fights whom to gerrymandering, which is a banal evil of its own sort. Gerrymandering? Why, yes. The way to win the war with balanced armies is to find who barely beats whom else (the mechanics, as far as I can see: (Spoiler - click to show)units start with 0-4 strength and lose one point for each fight they win,) and give yourself four wins and one big loss. You can even try to lose this way, too. But one thing I noted was (Spoiler - click to show)it wasn't whether you won or lost, but WHO won or lost, that caused the ending. There are three, and one is almost redemptive and potentially makes Dr. Horror feel like a big trolley problem. And this made me think: for all the physical power everyone has, or the offices and connections, you ultimately have the most power, because you have a bit of knowledge the others don't. And with this knowledge, your status as outward underdog is a bit fake.

Overall, if you're up to a lot of macabre jokes, and you understand/enjoy the genre (written or film,) Dr. Horror seems like it's for you. Perhaps it hit a perfect storm that almost made me put it down. But it was an "almost" because the craftsmanship is obvious, and the bad guys are clearly labeled as bad guys. "Bad actor trying to force their way through" could be a cliche, but here there's variety in the puzzles and knowledge of over-the-top horror films in detail.

One word on the fatalities and why I found them unpalatable: (Spoiler - click to show)I've run into mean security guards and nice ones. Perhaps it's not even security guards, but the people who work the late shift at the athletic club and have to deal with folks who won't go home. I remember leaving my house keys in the office at work and forgetting my badge to sign in when working late, and a security guard I knew helped me get back in. Or I left some writing notes on top of a machine at the athletic club, and the front desk person let me run in to get it. That sort of thing. And it's not a very respected job, and it's not where people want to be, but they need to pay the bills. But it's funny. I admit to thinking "gee, why can't the security guard reminded me more of that one condescending security guard from my high school? That'd be more fun." So Dr. Horror brought out that less-than-beautiful side in me. And I suppose the point is that you are killing innocent people, which is a step beyond Arnie ruining careers or providing lousy pay and benefits.

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A Paradox Between Worlds, by Autumn Chen

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Collapse of a fictitious fanfic community, December 21, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

My initial thoughts on APBW rambled a bit. It brought up a lot of ideas that swirled around. They took a while to settle. It's a very ambitious work, and I'm not surprised it co-won the Golden Banana. But I'm also not surprised it placed highly, as I think it was rewarding to go through even though I only went in for part of its experience. It's about an online fan-community for young adult fanfiction that blows apart when the author of the books insults someone who's a big fan of theirs. In this case, it's GT McMillan, author of the Nebula series. To me, the GT sort of lampshades JK Rowling's hot takes on Twitter and fans' disappointment.

But I think it's more than just frustration with a Rowling clone. They get relatively little text compared to you and your friends. Overall, APBW helped me realize how much stability some online communities have, because with competent, sane adults in charge and some simple rules, along with punishment for trollish "look how these rules aren't perfect," really terrible things don't happen. But then again, these communities have decentralized power. For instance, the SBNation group of blogs knows the college athletes they cheer for are, well, only twenty or so, and they make mistakes. Or they know the commissioners of their favorite league aren't there out of altruism. Or they can see the good and bad sides of their favorite or most hated coaches. And the rules are simple: no bigotry, no flaming, no illegal streaming links. They work. I'll be comparing things in this review, because I had a lot of moments saying "Well, life goes on, right?" Though it sort of doesn't.

When you are young, that all is a lot tougher, even without trolls around. Any chaotic event throws things into turmoil, especially when an adult precipitates it, because adults don't DO these things, right? Especially one that could write such cool books that really stick it to bad guys?

Well, GT McMillan DOES do something. Not right away, though. APBW is told through the lens of an aspiring fanfic writer who blogs a lot on tumblr. You're amazed at the people who write more and, apparently, better than you do. But you'd like to try. You have friends you reblog and like and so forth, but you quickly realize they're at cross-purposes with each other. Some friends have troubles that get reblogged, both trivial and serious. Some friends just post for attention. Your reactions to this can get you blocked. I wound up completely ignoring the @brunova-official fanfic account, as I figured any drama with romantic fanfiction between Bruno and Gali, the two most popular characters (I didn't want to worry about the details of the work-within-a-work,) and I still made enough connections. I was amused to find the author's comments in the source, explaining how following and rehashing that sort of thing got you lots of likes, just because.

So I did all right with the whole writing racket. Despite my character's reticence and worry everyone was better than they were, I kept racking up likes, as my character paged through the five physical senses for ideas ("What do you think/smell/see/hear/feel/taste?") and my character wrote stuff down. This was meant to be mechanical and formulated on the player-character's just plowing through and doing what they were told in English class, when really they want to do so much more. People assure the PC that it's all so good and so forth. Then the pivotal moment comes. McMillan doesn't just cut down any fan but one who really looked up to McMillan. Others who did so, too, are confused. Some of your friends proclaim McMillan "over," even as the actors and actresses of the movie based on the series disagree. There's a split among fans with big followings, too, that goes beyond "Who's the coolest character?" Claire/Shadow-Protectrix, a big fanfic writer who organizes NebulaCon, comes down on McMillan's side (ironic, given their screen name) when your friend Luna is attacked by GT McMillan, prompting more attention than Luna ever wanted. She winds up deleting her account and starting a new one and not even asking for reblogs in support of her.

NebulaCon's largely organized by adults, too, or at least Internet friends who seem grown-up for their age! Most of whom are nice, but some of whom let the kids know who's in charge. And with every pronouncement of Claire's that she has to scale back, I certainly feared NebulaCon would be canceled. Because NebulaCon is only once a year, as opposed to twelve fall weekends for football, where fans of opposing blogs on SBNation get together for more than just the obligatory "preview with the enemy." They take pictures. They even share loss and big life moments. It can happen every week, even between fans of archrivals. And stuff like this shows the best of Internet fandom, of people getting together and helping each other through disappointment, of empathizing and saying "what if it happened to me?"

It's pretty clear the downside of the McMillan community collapsing is much higher for its members than for adult sports fans. And it's not just pro- or anti-McMillan. There's "we should've known it all along" and "I still can't believe it" among the antis. At one point, the main character wrestles with a passage that discusses not being false to yourself and how it was interpreted as pro-trans, but after MacMillan's words, they realize they maybe saw what they wanted to. This parallels fans tired of a losing coach, in a sports community. Some think they can still right the ship, some see the signs in retrospect, and flame wars start. But the stakes are higher, because when you're younger and don't know certain mind game tricks jerks play, and you have to hold on to what's there and be glad there's only so much trolling. You don't even feel you can speak out against jerks who like what you like, because on balance, they've been a positive, right? And it may seem there is no plan B if your group of book-loving friends collapses. The author touches on this by having some characters say "Hey! I found this cool KPop group." Which is different from what you'd expect, logically, such as "hey, there's another great book series." But in that moment I realized both you-the-character and your friends wanted to say "I don't want to lose you as a friend" but you didn't want to seem that desperate.

And, of course, you will need to stay together. Good things will end. As you write your final fanfic, you-the-character are far too aware the fourth wall break you make is as mechanical as checking off the five senses and "think" for writing prompts, and it's done before, and it will be done again, splitting community or not, because it's part of growing and moving on. You actually do finish your fanfic and go out on a high. That, along with trying to support your friend McMillan called out, is all you can do, especially when McMillan doubles down. (Well, actually, you can side with Claire. I didn't have the heart.) The older fans who orphaned their fanfiction–well, you get it now, you didn't see how they could stop if they had this gift, surely they could've just glided into a pretty-good ending sheerly out of momentum. You figured people just kept having stuff to say, and they don't. I had a similar thing happen when writing game guides at GameFAQs. I realized I was going to run out of motivation or games, and I also realized YouTube might become a Very Big Thing. I eventually just had a list of games left that would up my total word-count. I moved on, slower than I should've, of course.

It's difficult when a community dissolves, big or small, but it's also so nice to cross paths again. Still, you just don't think you will, and while that's out of the scope of APBW, I'd like to think the narrator plants the seeds for that, despite NebulaCon being canceled. They'll find other interests. I suppose it's the same sort of thing as a first crush, except, well, it's about having lots and lots of friends that evaporate, or you know you won't be able to keep track of them all.

Playing through once was exhausting. I had trouble remembering which player in the canon was which, and I also had to brush up on which of your blogmates did what. But it was the first of this sort of writing I'd seen in this form, and I found it amazingly effective for getting me to sit down and thing. I had a lot to say, and on reflection, it might not seem relevant now, but it filled a place that other IFComp games didn't come close to filling. So I think it was overall very successful as a story and an interesting world, as well as a reminder of all the stories I wanted to write but never quite did.

The author had a lot to say in their postmortem. There was a lot to read, so for the first time through, I simply looked at the source code to see some of the options and such that I missed. The check_blocked.txt file provided me with great amusement and demystified some of ChoiceScript. There still feels like a lot to unpack. But I found I was able to keep up with APBW, even if I had to ignore chunks, as I learned some terminology that made total sense once I read it.

APBW originally inspired some much more random, rambling thoughts that I don't want to pull out of the authors' forum. They're not really about APBW. But they were important to write and bury. They reminded me of the slow breakup of other communities and some I'm still shocked are there. APBW even reminded me to check some I thought were dead, and it's great to see them live on, or even see a 31-year-old say "hey, some people were really nice to me when I was clueless and 13, and I miss them." I remembered how I wrote game guides because I didn't feel qualified to write actual cool games, just as the narrator writes fanfic. (I still haven't written a graphical one!) I saw parallels between fanfic and some humorous features at SBNation sites, such as the ubiquitous Power Poll which ranks teams in a conference and compares them to characters from The Office or skits from I Think You Should Leave or, from one very creative person, stages of evolution. And it all works. It somehow pulls everyone together and reminds them of what they want to look at while they wait for the next game. Simple yet funny rules are established: on offtackleempire, a site for Big Ten team fans, you must punch in on Saturday if your team lost this weekend. There are inside jokes, but of course people with decent Google skills can figure them out, and they deserve to. And there are fanfic legends, people who wrote great stuff and are maybe retired now, but they drop in unexpectedly with a few hilarious tweets or essays.

This all is the result of a fully mature community and may not be as exciting as McMillan fan communities, but it's at least as rewarding. APBW made me realize how much we have, more than any impressive "look how far we've come and what we take for granted" speech could. For that I'm grateful. I'm even grateful for people I like only because we like the same team (just as APBW's characters like the same series and maybe even share a favorite book or character, and it's wonderful until they find other incompatibilities,) or even people I liked and then it fell apart. I even wound up sort of wishing I could explain this to some of the more upset APBW characters. Perhaps it's worth doing in real life.

It seems reasonable to critique APBW for problems of focus, or of certain things being too generic, but it's wildly ambitious and hits the mark often enough that I, a layman to fanfic, enjoyed it much better than more polished traditional efforts which seemed to fit in a nice box. Once I got into it, it felt like something someone would have done eventually, and I'm glad it got done so well. And it reminded me of all the things that could've gone wrong but didn't. It hurt when longtime Purdue basketball head coach Gene Keady laughed as he endorsed Donald Trump in 2016, a man Keady would've kicked off the team after a week on general principles. I was disappointed with the accusations swirling around Kingdom of Loathing's co-creator and how this forced a much more serious view of the nightcap you drink to get drunk with your turns gone at day's end. And I'm glad I didn't know about Roald Dahl's dark side until he was an adult. Yet at the same time, any one of these is the sort of growing-up experience I'd have loved to have other people around for, even if things fell apart at the end. APBW captured that and more for me, and thus, I value it.

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AardVarK Versus the Hype, by Truthcraze

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
High school angst and (oops) a corporate-induced zombie apocalypse, December 11, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

(Disclaimer: I tested AvtH prior to IFComp 2021.)

So I was wrong about AvtH in two ways. First, I assumed it would place much higher than it did. Second, I assumed the author's adolescence was much more "I hate high school" than it was. AvtH grabbed my attention with what I thought was an easy target, and then it proceeded to hit others and provide some good laughs along the way. It's supposed to be more than a bit silly, but it has enough of the wisdom of looking back mixed in, so the silliness is not just for its own sake. It's sympathetic to its own characters without getting overwrought, and perhaps people didn't notice all the wisdom, since it was very gentle. Well, for a zombie apocalypse.

You play AvtH in different perspectives, as members of a high school band. Not the one with fuzzy busbies and uniforms–oh no. Much less conformist than that. You have no school spirit, remember! You play four different members of a very loud and earnest grunge band as you go through a story of oppression from the popular kids and corporate types trying to appeal to you. Many dramatic incidents center around a Gas'N'Stuff, which is a great name whether an actual Gas'N'Stuff franchise exists or not. (It does, indeed, seem to. But not where I lived. I suppose it has that mystery about it, like the Circle K in Bill and Ted or Ralph's in The Big Lebowski. I figured both couldn't possibly exist.) One winds up feeling quite sorry for the poor chap behind the counter after all this. Dealing with the band members is not so bad, but, well ... if he's the owner, I hope he had insurance. If he's not, poor guy having to explain all this to the owner.

AvtH is presented as a series of flashbacks from when the first band member, Jenny, stumbles to the garage where you all practice, up to the present time. Something weird has happened to you, and you know something weirder will happen shortly! Your bandmates, well, they need to verify your story, as you're incapacitated. They find one small clue as to how to reverse the damage, which provides a running gag, too.

Once Jenny is subdued, there's a flashback to earlier in the day: a school assembly where a company was promoting the new soft drink, Hype! Now I remember as a kid Jolt! cola came out, but ... it was marketed a bit differently. The pandering was there, but it was less tone-deaf. Also, maybe I wasn't old enough to be cynical yet. As Jenny, you go through the humiliating actions of screaming loudest for free (and ugly) clothing (there's a point to WEARING it) and make the mistake of drinking Hype! She doesn't drink much, so it takes time to turn her into a zombie. But it still happens.

Armed with what they know, your friends start following leads. Amanda goes to the Gas'N'Stuff to buy stuff. What stuff? Um, stuff you could get for free in college. You need condoms, because the zombies have latex allergies, and balloons aren't available. The illicitness behind stealing them for Completely Different Reasons works for me. Sneaking out of the gas station with them may be slightly amoral, but it contains good stock jokes about the sort of yucky things you buy at convenience stores when you're desperate. Stuff you swear you'd never buy, especially at THAT price.

Another, Lewis, needs a tape of your greatest hits. There's no time for a performance, so he remembers one he gave to a girl he liked. He's not getting in the front door (the jock guarding it is well described) so he has to sneak in through a window, which would be creepy under normal circumstances, but when everyone's a zombie, it's not so bad. The party is, well, unusual. Lewis has a few revelations about how she's ignored him, but there are some bright spots. Maybe. More importantly, he gets the tape. With another involuntary assist of sorts again from the Gas'N'Stuff. Lewis's distraction is also bad for upkeep, but hey, the fate of the world could be at stake.

Finally, Paul needs a plot to get his brother's car. This involves a rather mean tip to the police, but one suspects Paul's brother sort of deserves it. Here I got sidetracked by the three food wrappers you have when the scene starts as a way to distract the hungry squirrel, and I should have figured where to get a quarter for a pay phone, but I should have realized what a focal point the Gas'N'Stuff was and gone that direction.

I believe I played this the same way through both when testing and seeing the comp version, so I didn't see anything different. I'd like to go back and switch the order, since the game lets you–it seems either one puzzle clues others, or you'll need an alternate solution. And the final scene ties it all together–your music will help free people's minds! The balloons will help keep you safe! The walkthrough has a neat misdirection here. It lists a hard way, but the easy way is more intellectually rewarding and in tune with the game's general humor.

There are a lot of good lines if you examine people and such, too, so again, if you just go through with the walkthrough (which has its own fourth-wall jokes) you'll miss out on a bit. Any one joke feels like it could've been dashed off and you could laugh and move on and say "oh, I was crazy when I was a teen," but they fit together well. The author mentioned he may've sat on the game for too long, but on the other hand, the jokes feel well-organized, and their sum is more than the parts. It was worth the wait. A lot of times I said, oh, that's maybe where the author got this joke, or this observation, and I'd seen it before. But the thing was, AVtH never relied too much on one canonical late 80s/90s reference, and it wasn't the WHOLE joke. I realized afterwards I'd missed a lot of references, and that seems like a good batting average: some of them, the reader will pick up on, but others will be from stuff they hadn't seen or had even forgotten and meant to watch again. Indeed, in the credits, the author mentions the state the game was in before testing, but I also think they deserve credit for building together a story that would've fallen apart with less thought. It's not a simple one.

AvtH is a very ambitious game despite its silly high-school-angst feel, and while the author uses some modules very well (especially the dialogue module) for pacing and for keeping things relatively simple for the player, there's some parser-fighting involved with its more advanced features. I felt bad maybe explaining to the author "Yeah, I bet you'll fix those nuisances, but a few more will pop up, because parser games gonna parser, and don't worry." That's the risk of ambition. Things won't be perfect. But AvtH covers bases more than well enough, with a hint system that picked things up nicely when I was floundering. It's a bit snarky, which may not work for some, but AvtH won't be their thing anyway. I chose to disassemble the blorb afterwards just to pick off the hints, because that sort of thing is too hard to track in-game, and I was rewarded.

The author also mentioned an ingenious shortcut in the forum that skips one of the areas. It's not obvious, but once he explained it, several people said "oh, of course." There's a lot of that in AvtH, which feels simplistic in some places, or we've heard this joke ... but AvtH does it better, and consistently, and you realize you're not hearing the stock jokes that get laughs in average sitcoms. I hope it's not insulting to say AvtH's like the best of Cheech and Chong. It doesn't seem super-clever because it doesn't try to be cleverer than you or shove its newness in your face, but all the same, there's nothing stale.

Oh. There's also an epilogue. It felt well-timed, like the credits at the end of a half-hour sitcom, when one last loose end is tied up, and the laugh track plays one final time. And yes, it works! I've seen other epilogues, but never one this short. More games should do this -- I really like having this sort of denouement.

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How it was then and how it is now, by Pseudavid

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
There's emotional reasoning hidden behind the spatial reasoning here. I think., December 10, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

HIWT promised to be interesting for me, as it described "two smart people walking to the center of many disasters." I like writing stuff about people who need to be smart, or are seen as smart, etc. And the main characters are characterized very well. They've had arguments. They argue over what they should remember and what the other person should remember. Oh, and they've been called to stop a huge apocalypse where everyone is turning to collections of geometric shapes (fingers become cylinders, head becomes a sphere, etc.,) and you're trying to run towards, or away from, something called the Exit, which will help stop all this. Unless you make a wrong step and get geometric-ized yourself. The puzzles alternate between telling which 3-d solid a graphic is a cross-section of, or having three lines between greater-than and less-than prompts. I (Spoiler - click to show)cut and pasted them to text and still seemed to get myself into trouble. So these may be red herrings.

Some parts of the work seem to be deliberate clues: the number of sides determines where to go next. So it seems like some of the talk choices between the narrator and Ciara, whom he is seeing after a long layoff, matter. As does whether you get the intelligence test-y choices right. They seem like they shouldn't be hard, but I wound up failing. I know my 3-d solids and what cross-sections look like. I also seemed to avoid bad choices some of the time, but the text still clouded over randomly, and Clara asked if I was okay and was sure I would figure it out, before I didn't. The text being blotched out seems to indicate I'm doing something wrong, too, but I can't catch what I did wrong or how the puzzles affected how I should respond. A look at the source seems to indicate that you die anyway, trying to relate to memories with your old friend (lover?) after your jobs split you apart.

And the text is interesting--there's a good deal more beyond what I saw, where you and Clara squabble as you run towards the Exit. I never made it. Later pats of HIWT seem to indicate that you coordinate with other people a good distance away. I never got there, so I never fit the writing in with the narrative.

This is one where I'd appreciate a walkthrough, and I assume there is a hearty helping of misdirection, since what I thought were logical tries for the puzzles didn't help me progress. Once I see it, I'll say "Oh, geez, of course." Perhaps you have to be not too mean or not too nice to Clara. But if so, I didn't quite see how that was clued. Still, what I saw, I liked. There may be too much misdirection in the puzzles, but the narration as you run towards the apocalypse to help fix it is strong.

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You are SpamZapper 3.1, by Leon Arnott

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
I admit, I preferred the shallower parts. Which weren't really shallow., December 10, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

There's a study showing that judges give harsher sentences when they're hungry. Or that's the claim. Causality hasn't been established, and I was interested to read alternate perspectives that poked holes in the "hungry judge" theory. But I remember the punchline and recalled it here on playing SZ31 late at night. It took a very cool premise and wavered at the end. That felt like my own mental fatigue, and then on replay, I wound up focusing on how I felt instead of looking through things again. Perhaps it tried to reach for a message that wasn't there. But either way, it still Had Quality Moments.

The title, if not the play time, suggests that you'll just be zapping spams until you mess up, and then everyone has a good laugh about how futile it all is and then goes home. That would be more than adequate for a decent IFComp entry, but there's a bit more. You do, in fact, play a spam-zapper plugin who ("that" is the inappropriate pronoun, I think, for reasons you'll see shortly) detects spam emails incoming to the account of your owner, Spoony. You get to choose a real name, but that's their email address and what they use on forums.

The tasks start out trivial. They may leave you nostalgic for some Greatest Hits of spam you've received. They did for me. Back in 2000, we had all long since gotten sick of feeling clever we could delete spam immediately, and when my webmail got a spam filter installed, I remember peeking inside just to say, hey, wow, it works, and there were relatively few false positives. It was interesting to see how spam filters got subverted by professional-looking messages, and if I was feeling dumb, being able to finger a particularly bad spam email that snuck through made me feel a bit smarter, as long as they weren't dumped on me. This brought back a lot of that, but there's also a ubiquitous needy loner or two who needs confirmation. Someone forgets their password. Someone at Spoony's workplace sends a mistaken reply-all, followed by reply-alls that are, well, mistaken in their own way. You, as the spam-zapper, have comments on that. You've seen it before. But you also get intents of spam and non-spam emails wrong. Artificial intelligence, amirite?

And that's where the actual story kicks in. One of Spoony's correspondents, Laurie Boggins, has a very, very restrictive father. Not only that, but she seems to have struck up a legitimate friendship with her Wizard email plugin. As her computer is confiscated, she sends one last email to Spoony saying, keep Wizard alive! And that's when the spam zapper "meets" other plugins. They try to band together and rescue this friend. In fact, they create their own virus to track down information. They understand morals in the small picture but maybe not the big one. Helping their owners is all that matters.

So they discuss what it means to exist, and this is where I slacked a bit. One thing about my slacking, though. If you've ever watched Amadeus, you may remember that one scene where the Emperor yawned during The Marriage of Figaro. If I yawn, and think of it? Well, whatever I am paying attention to is not Figaro, but I know it's probably part me. Perhaps I was disappointed the helper apps didn't just stay in their place and entertain me. I mean, it's probably more in-character for them to discuss concepts like nous or whatever that might make people say "get back to the jokes, already." It's tough for AI to make jokes. But it's earnest and does go on a bit, and while I enjoy a good "what and why are we, and what are we doing here?" I felt a small bait-and-switch.

Still, the spam dumping does go on a bit. By the time you've finished deleting the reply-alls, a QuickBasic worm pops up. Then one of Spoony's friends begins composing spam-looking emails that you, SpamZapper, consider to be mind-control spam. Yes, you're wrong, but it's internally plausible. Then you have to search through forty or so emails to find information to the odd plan you've hatched with Wizard and the New Mail Chimes to get Laurie's computer back, to "save" her. They don't seem to understand humans can survive without computers, and yet, at the same time, they're technically–Laurie's father taking her computer away is most unjust. While some emails could obviously be rejected, I just got dragged down by the tedium and took a break and then came back to a few more "search Spoony's emails" puzzles. It was tiring, but I can't see any other way to do it.

My tired mind did find the whole plot a bit too farcical, and all the talk of nous seemed a bit mystical to me, and I zoned out, but I was still able to appreciate the loneliness of Spoony's friends and what sort of person Spoony must be. Still, I can't help but feel I mostly enjoyed the low-hanging fruit. The switch between the general narrative and the mailbox work well, as does the glimpse into a post-apocalyptic (well, climate change) future. It's hard not to be amused at SpamZapper forcing decisions or having something it HAS to say about Spoony's dad's email. You'll know which one. And the time-distortion where you're not sure how much time was between emails, but it helps remind you the spam zapper can't understand certain emotional concepts natural to humans. Yet it tries. And I felt, as I was playing, I was missing something, but I hope I was trying.

So my advice is to be awake for this game. You'll need the energy, but I guarantee it will pay you back, even if you drift a bit. There are lots of funny examples of how AI gets things wrong, and I think this was the strongest part, where you can see clearly that the well-meaning plugins are about to release something potentially catastrophic. It's quite a good laugh and very touching, but looking at the work again, my eyes glossed over the philosophical discussion. Still, once you solve the game, there's an amusing way to unlock design discussions for each character, and I appreciated them very much. Though I needed a break after all that philosophizing. It's tough. I've written games where I wanted to be smart, and smart people told me "keep it simple, stupid," but really, I thought the parts they disliked were the best part. SZ31 turns the table on me, as I found I wanted to give it the same advice. So I feel like a bit of a hypocrite, but given a choice between the funny story plus philosophizing and nothing at all, give me the first.

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An Aside About Everything, by Sasha

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Great title but short on memorable bits, December 10, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

An Aside About Everything seemed to promise a universal message and maybe didn't quite follow through on it, but it was still quite worthwhile. You're some nameless man or, more precisely, Him. You want to find a woman, whose last name is an initial. This reminds me of an admonishment from Geoffrey Braithwaite, the protagonist of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot. Rule 8 in particular: "8. No novels in which the narrator, or any of the characters, is identified simply by an initial letter. Still they go on doing it!"

Now I may or may not have started my own writings with a character named A. and later, when I was feeling adventurous, J. But AAAE started this off with a main character named Him and K, so along with the title, it felt like it was swinging for the fences with someone generally-named. It never quite got there, and the conclusion, though pleasant, didn't feel earth-shattering. But it had enough for enjoyment.

You, as He, start off in the sort of dingy detective office Geoffrey Braithwaite, again, might cluck at if he played lots of text adventures, parser or twine. It's in The Void, though, and you can escape to it at any time and return to the Outer Ring and, later, the Inner Ring. Along the way you meet a bunch of women who give you information about K. Why they know this, it's not clear, but they seem to have nothing better to do. One has an assortment of pills that give different emotions. You have to find four weird objects to give her to get all the pills, but then, you only get to take one pill at the end, which is kind of a bummer. I have a chance to take mind-altering drugs I never would in real life, and it's taken away from me for .... a revelation that, apparently, the journey is more important than the goal! This is nice, but it belies the game's initial ambition. Perhaps the narrator needs to learn this sort of thing along the way.

But this is sniping on my part. Looking back, it makes sense. He uses four women to get at the woman he really wants, and he has to realize he's been using them, and he has to admit he went about things in the wrong way and didn't deserve K's attention. So it all neatly folds together. And if I knew the ending was coming, I was surprised to remember things I'd looked long and hard for until they weren't worth it for themselves. But I realized things on the way, and I realized I realized things on the way. It just felt a bit blunt.

My adventures where I found this in real life were far less supernatural. For instance, I remembered books I loved as a kid and picked them off with city library intra-branch loan, and tracking down everything by an author or everything in a series was a rewarding sort of adventure, and AAAE felt like that. But it wasn't having the books so much as going through the process of finding what I wanted quickly and no longer missing it or worrying I was missing something big. And of course these books weren't perfect, but they were worth finding, and doing so encouraged me to tackle bigger projects and not be upset about what I missed.

Or there was that BASIC game programming book I remembered a year ago. Another BASIC book tipped me off to vague memories, and I followed the trail until I saw a cover I recognized. Then a friend tipped me off there was a sequel, which I built up in my mind until finally I just went through with it. The programs that seemed so profound, and they seemed, well, pretty cheap, and the sequel objectively wasn't much more. And I couldn't blame myself for not typing them out, or I recognized the coding was weak, and I realized I'd even remembered some as far more complex than they were. It was something I thought I had to find, though I didn't really. But when I found it, it was good enough. (The books, by the way, are by David Ahl.)

Him's realization reminded me of this and more. I don't know if I stayed fully tuned in for AAAE, but part of that was that I was connecting to His experience. And His being able to manipulate women to get what he wanted paralleled a Julian Barnes (again) short story where a person slowly got everything he wanted and asked to be truly happy and then was left with just his life. AAAE felt like that, though it took longer to get there and didn't have the same punch. I don't really remember whom you need to manipulate, and for what, beyond Luna. But it had enough for a good, positive think.

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Second Wind, by Matthew Warner

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Non-cheery Adventuron games can still be entertaining, December 10, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

So I got something entirely different than I expected in Second Wind. Seeing what I wanted to see, I noticed the skillful cover art and the italics noting Second Wind was in Adventuron. The least cheery Adventuron game I'd played up until this point had been Snowhaven, which claimed the title by default, because it had normal, serious and dark mode, and I only played on normal mode, which was very nice, and it had warnings plastered abut serious and dark mode. And given the cover art and how Adventuron gives you a picture for each room, I thought we might be treated to something whimsical artistic. However, I only noticed the art quality and what it meant.

I was then disabused quickly of the notion Second Wind was just another cheery Adventuron game, perhaps where you finally have the courage to complete that marathon in a new record time, or you give a friend another chance. But I was also surprised the graphics were utilitarian. It seems like a chance missed, as if the author wanted to make sure they got the technical bits down. Maybe they felt more obligation than they should have to get things technically straight. And they did. They put together a pretty stirring story, too. But I'm left saying "Hey, for post-comp, why not put in an option to see more creative instead of practical pictures, for those who want to replay?" This is my greedy side. I know how tough it is to put it all together and to shift between the technical side and the graphical side. But certainly if the author writes another game in Adventuron, I'd be there just for the pictures, happy story or no.

Saying SW is a timed puzzle does bury what the puzzle is. You're in a fallout shelter. It protects you from werewolves. If they bite you, you change into one, and they're everywhere. Your wife is pregnant, but there are complications. She will give birth in six hours, but if she does, she and the baby will die. You need someone with more experience delivering babies than the nearby midwife, who knows she is over her head. The only person nearby that you can reach in the time frame is your ex-wife. She is your ex-wife because you were cheating on her with your current wife. So your task is to trek across miles of desert from Shelter 4 to Shelter 5. Yes, mass depopulation has occurred, thus making every newborn baby that much more critical. It'd be easy for her to say no. So even a "good" ending will be extremely awkward, even without the whole werewolf apocalypse thing still in progress.

This is a powerful plot, and the title suggests there are obstacles (there are!) Some might just be neighbors who are sick of you, or it might be the hoverbike that's a bit run down, and you have to fix it. But there are also fiddly bits, like opening the airlock properly. The thing about airlocks: I don't mind opening and closing them, but if I have to do so too often in a game or story in the course of a week, it's a bit exhausting, even when it's well-implemented in all instances. And it would be wrong not to acknowledge that, yes, this is a necessary precaution. But I had an "oh no, not again" moment that doesn't seem to be this game's fault. Once you have played X games with airlocks, they all blend together, and if the next one is unrealistic, it can break mimesis, and if it doesn't, you say "Oh no, not again."

Other fiddly bits were how you got the codes you needed to punch in to unlock certain areas. Sometimes this had a bit of emotional resonance and sometimes it relied on pop culture (e.g. a phone number ending in 09–when seeing how googleable it would be, I was surprised another number had gotten higher on the charts in the past few years.) Punching in keypads definitely disrupts the emotional flow of the game, but then again, there has to be some security. I did like how if you type the wrong number, you were locked out for a few game-minutes without having to wait in real life. There's also some fiddling with putting on your protective suit–after the first time you should just be able to REMOVE ALL or WEAR ALL. This is all an occasional nuisance, and it may, in fact, bury the lede that the game's mechanic of allowing variable time per typed move preserve a realistic accounting of in-game time without slapping the player around.

Second Wind is weakest when it gets hung up on minutae--perhaps the author felt they had to offer this detail or things wouldn't be nailed down technically. But it also makes an effort to get around them and explains what will cost you time and so forth. And, of course, in an apocalyptic future, precautions must be taken! It makes an effort to be fair as a timed puzzle, with checkpoints established and maps of the shelters with a "you are here" dot. So I think it works well, even though my suspicions are that the author didn't play well to their strengths. I hope this isn't backhanded praise, because my overall feelings were, they went out of their comfort zone to do this, and they should be pleased with the result. I am, and I think it bodes well for their next effort that may play to their strengths more fully.

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Ghosts Within, by Kyriakos Athanasopoulos

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Too long for IFComp without a walkthrough, but lots for horror fans to like, December 6, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

GW is a big game, much too big to tackle without a walkthrough, and as a result, when I saw a rather large hint thread for how to get through it on the forums, I sort of ran away from it. It was the last entry I looked at in IFComp 2021. And boy, did I get off to a rough start. It was move 600 before I got a point, mostly because I wanted to take time to map things out. Perhaps TADS's technical boosts Inform lacks were such a crutch I enjoyed tinkering with them and forgot lateral thinking. The module to forgive bad spelling, which I always forget until the next TADS game appears, is quite nice. And in-game, the ASK and TELL were well-organized. There was already a map on the forums, but the thing is--there are three people you can start as, based on the direction you go to start. So the map seemed off, and I didn't know why. This was all overwhelming, but as it turns out, GW is a pretty good game overall.

I confess I decompiled the game to get as far as I did. I wound up having to ask for something slightly outside the box, and once I saw what I missed, I realized I could've typed ABOUT. But these are the risks of a big game, especially one that forces you to do so much concrete preparation to get your bearings. So I never considered asking for materials I needed to make certain areas accessible, namely, oil for the lantern I'd found. Once I did, I got clued/pushed to the right person. In the context of a game being a game where you find stuff and combine it to make new stuff, I should have remembered this. Though, as a person who's new to a village and probably better-off than the villagers, it felt weird to ask them for anything. Maybe that was too far outside the box.

But once that block was gone, I felt more comfortable/less uncomfortable, if slightly less immersed, asking around for what I needed. The story had fit together nicely even in the one-point-out-of-fifty state. I'd started off with a new job at FARMA who, apparently, did research on fog (and where better to do so than at the outskirts of a town called Foghelm?) but also with some injuries from a surprise attack. There was an odd man in a hut that villagers didn't like to talk about, an eerily simple twentysomething daughter of the mayor, a cloying gas station/hotel owner, and a captain and smith who both seemed to want to help me. Some places, it was signposted I couldn't do anything without the right item. For instance, there were rusty chains blocking me from an entrance, and elsewhere, someone offered to loan me a hammer, if I fed them, which was (again) a bit odd. The big mystery unfolding had to do with a ship crashing on the rocks, with a fatality, and whose fault it was: the lighthouse keeper, or a young lover?

So the story was set well, and the main block seemed to be finding the right nooks to find stuff in. I wasn't quite able to do this. GW suggested look and search were different (ugh,) and I wound up remembering this some of the time, which left a lot of ground to cover. I confess (again) I peeked at how you scored points, and that gave me a boost. I probably went past two hours. But I liked what was there, even/especially the directions I couldn't quite go in, and why. Once I understood different starting paths blocked off different paths in the town, I was glad to know the game-world was bounded. But this, in addition to everything you had to do to gather in-world evidence, was tough to fit into a two-hour comp judging period. Which is too bad--once it clicked that different directions made you a different person, and it all seemed sensible, I took time to be impressed at how well it was organized.

However, I still feel a bit odd asking for the things I needed to ask for: "Hey! can I borrow the gloves you're wearing?" or "Mind if I use your stove?" It felt slightly invasive towards others. I mean, yes, interactable NPCs are a good thing, but I never quite shook this off, so GW provided the wrong sort of creepy at times, not illegal creepy, but just violating people's boundaries. Nevertheless, I was entertained, because there's a lot to like, and reading about the different paths through felt proper. It's neat to see different stories GW has to tell. The author has been great with help on the forums and accepting that, okay, people might mark GW down a bit, and they should be proud of what they've offered us. But I have to draw the line. I've seen two of the endings, and I don't want to get stuck on any one game. I may play through the full ending, but I found the world and map vivid enough to recall, and I know where I spun out. So I'll be able to process the full story, so I can move from "hey, this looks and feels right" to something more rigorous.

Overall, there is a lot to like and look forward to, but unless you're a horror fan, I don't really recommend diving into GW and trying to find everything without serious guidance. I read someone on the forums say "I got all 50 points! What a great game!" and I believe them. And I hope that's not an "oh sure some people will like this." I'm going to wait until a full walkthrough is posted. I know there are four endings: one is a quick failure where it's strongly hinted beforehand that you're begging for trouble, two are qualified successes, and one is the "true ending." I'd love to see the differences between paths through. I know from experience that different villagers can react more positively depending on whom you start as, though most of the core puzzles stay the same. I'm not really sold on one of the three directions, as it seems a bit improbable, but I do want to look for it.

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The House on Highfield Lane, by Andy Joel

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Nice-and-creepy showcase for Quest 6, December 5, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

The House on Highfield Lane is a neat demonstration of Quest 6 and JavaScript. I beta-tested it, but I unfortunately wasn't able to add much to the final product, as it was pretty polished when I got it. It's a big, smart game, and big smart games sometimes need idiot-proofing, especially when the idiot is a judge who wants to get through the other seventy IFComp games. The HINTS referenced from the game weren't enough (I see what I missed now,) so I needed to wait for the post-comp walkthrough to see the end. But I think my tries at finishing paid off I got a bit further each time. I think it was worth the wait to suss out the details I missed. I may be grading the author on a curve because I know the author is technically and creatively capable, and my view may be slanted because this isn't my favorite genre. But I do feel HoHL may have missed a few chances for greatness that I can't fully articulate.

You play as Mandy, a girl who finds a letter by a house she's walked past and always wondered about and, you guessed it, uses that as an excuse to enter. There's no easy way out, so she figures she may have to deliver the letter and talk to the owner.

Well, that's not strictly true. You can leave briefly in two ways: once to get an important though common item, and a second time, you need to set up a science experiment just right. Nothing abstruse, if you know your haunted-house tropes. For one of them, you walk a bit of a tightrope, and it's nice and low-key scary.

THe rest of the house is as odd as you'd expect. Some was charming, but the map wraps oddly--if you go west from one room, you eventually wind up below it, and it felt like surrealism for surrealism's sake. It's also possible to flood one of the few hub rooms (exits three ways) with mannequins during one try, which gives the old-school vibes HoHL wants to project, but maybe not the best ones. I did, however, appreciate the clear signal of a room you needed to get to (an empty lift shaft) and the drawing room that grew or shrunk you based on which way you entered and, by extension, items you dropped there. It made for some interesting puzzles, but maybe the game relied a bit too heavily on it. I got a bit tired of circling back and forth near the end, and I in fact avoided the room because I figured it had served its purpose after the first couple of puzzles.

Then I didn't quite "get" the puzzle about awakening a Frankenstein style monster, until I did, and it made sense, and I had fun getting it to do what I needed. That monster helps you with more puzzles later, and it's the cute sort of stupid. I like how it neutralized some other NPCs. The final puzzle? Well, it was a bit of a pun, and it lampshaded the absent-mindedness of the Doctor, whom you eventually do meet, once he tells you his interpretation. It's a bit of a Dad joke, which is appropriate, since the author indicated in his post-mortem he wrote it with his daughter in mind.

As for the technical stuff: Quest really has grown up a lot! Even stuff like saving and restoring has bells and whistles and circumvents the difficulties that arise from Inform save states, namely that they're useless if the binary is updated. The InvisiClues that come with HoHL are nice, if you don't want everything spoiled. And I love that you can miss the last letter or several letters of an 8-letter word, and Quest figures it out. There's enough so that the verb-recognition error, which I found terribly snarky ("I can't even begin to make sense of this") isn't very prominent--this seems like a missed chance. The game tries to capture the tone of wonderment of a 16-year-old locked in a strange house, with a lot of "Mandy wonders this." So "Mandy had a thought, but she didn't know how to (word 1, or word after the comma in dialogue)--maybe her mind was just foggy" seems like it would work. But as-is, when I had a typo on a tough puzzle, it made me groan. Worse things happen at sea, of course, and I've been guilty of not battening down some of Inform's more tone-deaf errors (default responses to "no" and "yes," for example) but this seemed like a slightly obnoxious design choice, especially when much of the rest of the game was written to be hands-off.

Despite these concerns, I got a lot of positive mileage out of HoHL, and the puzzles made sense once I had that a-ha moment. I think I was at a disadvantage as I wasn't really familiar with haunted-house tropes. The puzzles have enjoyable variety in retrospect, and the atmosphere is good--nothing too terribly scary here, as long as you don't release the frustrating mannequins. There's no dread of being trapped, more just "neat, I'm stuck." I'm glad the author left a full walkthrough so I could figure what I did wrong, though. I'd have missed the neat bit after I got up the lift. The puzzle to get upstairs was a bit fiddly even with the hints, though I like that they're there as gradated spoilers, for those who want to dwell a bit longer.

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Silicon and Cells, by Nic Barkdull and Matthew Borgard

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Cute pastel-colored text, seedy cyberverse, successful Unity effort, December 4, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

I've known Unity was powerful for a while, yet maybe it was too powerful for a regular-style text adventure. There've been Unity games in IFComp before, the first (I think) being Milk Party Palace back in 2014. It was relatively harmless, featuring Montell Jordan's "This is How We Do It" as part of the soundtrack, as well as random demands from Alec Baldwin. So it was just a case of people showing off their new and shiny unity skills. That's all well and good, but with Unity being more mature and less new and shiny, we'd hope for something deeper, and I think Silicon and Cells gives that to the reader.

IFComp 2021 had no shortage of simulation games, or games where you went into cyberspace. While they ran together for me, largely because I procrastinated a lot to their end, each was clearly its own game. I think Silicon and Cells stood out the most for me. That's partially due to a good story, but I have to admit I remembered the technical features most. One of the first things SnC provides is immediate customization of font size. This may not seem like a big deal, until you realize you can use the mouse wheel to scroll through the main text window, and you don't have to click "next" nearly as much, and you don't have to worry if you read something carefully enough before clicking "next." This was a big relief to me. The game said 1 1/2 hours, but it valued my time and saved my energy, so I was able to focus on the story. You can, of course, control-scroll wheel with twine, but Unity calculates the text wrapping so you can see as much or little as you want.

The other thing about the text is this: the game is divided into Meatspace, with light blue text, and Cyberspace, with pink text, both on a background. This echoes the "dark mode" that works so well on browsers, and so I'm grateful for it. While Meatspace simply has a standard text interface, Cybertext is is a neat curved 3-d surface plot with all sorts of cute places (castle, your own home replete with whiteboard) and reenforces that it's, well, not real. You know where you are without having to look up a specific location And your dialogue/where-to-go choices are in a thin rectangle on the right. This makes it so reading is never exhausting, and these are the sort of design choices that you take for granted once they work well, but people miss them a lot if they're gone. And it's needed, once playtime gets over an hour. I experienced very few "are we there yet" moments as I went through, despite having no walkthrough.

You don't really need one to get through, either. Because the progression is straightforward, though the puzzles aren't trivial. You, as Jaya, have failed at a heist, but you've apparently done well enough for your quasi-mentor Elihu to encourage you to things bigger than a giant heist. Elihu's plans are deep, and you wind up having to see and talk to a lot of shady people who themselves are fighting against even shadier people. On the way, you get bionic upgrades. You can't use them all at once. In fact, at first, you can only possess one at a time. These form the basis for most of the puzzles. I went with social engineering, which occasionally gives an extra dialogue choice that pops up as soon as you switch it on. Unsurprisingly, these move the game and narrative forward in ways regular chat can't. I also got enhanced vision, which let me see fingerprints on a keypad. Later on, you get super strength or the ability to slow down time, and you get multiple charge units, so you can, for instance, really slow time down or get super strong. Many of the later puzzles require you to switch to the right power-ups in time, or you die. Sort of. The game just kicks you back a bit, and you have to try again. Since there was no save feature, I appreciated this.

As for the details of the plot? It's fun to figure how to cheat at the casino or visit people in cyberspace. The small MUD is full of humor and purpose and an appropriate villain (not that anyone's TERRIBLY nice here) and, of course, a puzzle to get around a troll with way more HP and damage per turn than you. There seems to be more than one way. There's also some character called The Oracle who used to be human and is sort of one of the Elders (like Elihu) who used to be in charge of things, before the G.O.D. framework and its cherubim (who are not very innocent enforcers) took over. You can only ask the Oracle factual questions, so often you need to find the right way to ask. Or you need to ask other NPCs the right way to ask.

So there's a lot of back-and-forthing among the various locations that include NebulaCorp, which is pretty dysfunctional and dystopian, and your own haunts. SnC is good about rejecting you if you don't need to do any more. Some NPCs are a bit snarky but never mean in suggesting where to go next, and your private home in Cyberspace with its whiteboard lets you connect the dots at your leisure. You do, indeed, have a choice of which Elder to betray or annoy. I wanted to betray one of them, but I couldn't figure the timed puzzle, so I went with the other. Hooray, expedience! Sadly I couldn't save and see the other ending quickly. That combined with no documentation cluing all the walkthroughs (surely for getting through the game we deserve a big-picture view of all the ways through?) was probably my biggest disappointment. I saw a well-conceived world but felt locked out from really exploring it, because a simple feature, one much simpler than SnC's useful conveniences, was absent. I noticed Mike Spivey's review mentioned he had an easier second time through, and experience bears this out. The interface is more comfortable, and you have an idea that the world is bounded.

Still, the story engaged me, and I missed that there was satire bit at first, but then again, I missed the satire in Fight Club and was just kind of disgusted (mitigating factor: many people praised it for what they thought it was.) Then again, I also missed the satire in RoboCop the first time through. Then I learned it was there, and I enjoyed Robocop a totally different way. Same, too, with the first bits of SnC. It's pretty clear the scene where you get bionic arms installed is meant to be, and I'm sure I've missed others. It's equally exciting played straight-up or acknowledging sly fourth-wall winks, and even before placing near the top quarter, it showed text-based adventures in Unity are worthwhile and doable, and you don't have to be super-dazzling. The authors showed considerable skill in making SnC accessible, enjoyable and even revisitable to someone who thought he was sick of internet/virtual reality simulators.

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Mermaids of Ganymede, by Seth Paxton

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Sci-fi that works, even for non-sci-fi fans, December 4, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

It's rare that finding a hang in a game helps you appreciate it more, but that's what happened in Mermaids. Certainly there was enough to appreciate beforehand, in this high-production-value science-fiction tale where you take a crew to one of Jupiter's moons, crash, and meed mermaids and mer-sharks. It's not just about the technology. As a captain of a research spaceship, you have ways of escaping (relatively lax) imprisonment, a chase through or under an iceberg, and ultimately some moral choices to make at the end.

So where was the hang? It was in the iceberg maze, in chapter 4 of 5. Mer-shark ambushes were too frequent, and I couldn't figure clues of when they were close by. I somehow missed the "survey" command that pinged where to go next. So I got a bit frustrated and hit F5 to restart and play chapter 5. MoG let me choose how I'd behaved, since I didn't save my game. Now this had also been done in At King Arthur's Christmas Feast, but there, the choices varied less, in order to remain faithful to the source material. Here, it acted as a nice hint of things to retry without spoiling too much. I'm the sort of person who enjoys picking apart all the story lines, so I was glad MoG recovered so well from the hang. Robustness in programming is a good thing.

Pacing is also good. The "action" chapters are 2 and 4, with dialogue in the odd-numbered chapters. In chapter 2, you have a very hands-off house arrest. Talking repeatedly to the warden turned up empty threats of actual imprisonment, and it couldn't have been by accident. That combined with the choices on starting chapter 5 makes for something to poke at on replay. Though the dialogue (chapters 1-3) felt up and down to me. Your crew consists of V.C, a pilot who felt nondescript, Emmett, who is not very likeable and knows it, but more importantly, knows his stuff ("the geyser guy,") and Hyun Jae, whose mother is on one of the research flights that vanished. Hyun Jae knows her mother is (was?) a better researcher than she is, and that makes her the most interesting of your crew. Later there's Cixatli, a mermaid guide who moves the story along by being there, but I felt she could have done more. But it all feels quite well thought out and worth following, even if some of the prose and dialogue feels flabby. Being able to fiddle with the different endings in chapter 5 made up for that. You have big choices of whether to stay and leave at some point, and you learn what happened to Hyun Jae's mother.

I felt like things fit very well in MoG even if they didn't totally shine. Part of that is maybe because I'm not really a science fiction fan. But it did feel consistently well-organized in the big picture. The graphics and music felt appropriate without being intrusive. The world building is there, and replayability is built into it. It feels like an entry that may not be anyone's utter favorite, but I'd have been shocked to see it in the bottom half. The effort put into it by the authors is clear, and I enjoyed it, but my thoughts tended toward "Yes, I see the authors put in a lot of good effort" instead of the fully immersive "wow, this is just neat! You have to play this now!" Still, if you are playing through the IFComp 2021 entries, it's worth more than a drive-by look.

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And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One, by B.J. Best

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A discussion of what nostalgia is and should be, December 4, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

ATY (we don't need the whole acronym) quickly establishes itself as metafiction: you, Em (short for Emerson,) are playing a distinctly mediocre game called Infinite Adventure with your friend, Riley, who's about to move away. You're young enough to still forgive programmers for the sort of simplicity found in IA, but you're old enough to want more and to start feeling bored. But these games are what you have. So you play them. You give an elf a carrot, because giving them a feather doesn't work. This continues until you and Riley realize that this is not the greatest way to spend time together before she leaves. And there's a nagging feeling you two aren't discussing what really matters.

There's not much to do besides play games, though, especially with the weather. Now part of ATY's task is: how to we make a game-in-a-game that's clearly boring, without making the game boring? Well, it makes several offerings, all of which are boring in their own way, but certainly back in the '80s this sort of variety felt like it had to be interesting. There's Infinite Adventure, featured in the blurb and cover art, which ... goes on, in its "give x to y" sort of way, until it's broken and you don't have the item you need to help a witch get organized. At this point, your in-game computer's menu reveals three other games: Warriors of Xanmor (all stereotypical adventure games should have an X,) Strip Poker and CompuDoctor. Each is a simplistic game with an adult NPC. All three have holes in their own lives. They're far from perfect. But each gives you appropriate distance from their shortcomings,. Strip Poker has impressive ASCII art which shows someone reclining without, well, showing anything. CompuDoctor is mostly textwalls with egregious typos (they're there for a purpose.) And Gardon, Warrior of Xanmor (the first NPC you meet) does the whole elevated middle English thing before lapsing into more normal chat or, once you're done chatting, estimating his experience points or performing other fourth-wall-breaking activities. There's also a shop in Xanmor, but your adventuring won't give you any currency it needs.

He needs something, and so does your opponent in Strip Poker and the doctor in CompuDoctor. Each one of them irks you in their own way. That's partially your own immaturity and part their own shortcoming as adults. There are particularly good parts here where you don't even want to talk to the doctor because he knows to much about you, and your strip poker opponent knows you aren't eighteen but tries to give you advice about growing up. And the three NPC, well, they know of each other, at the very least. And when I played through quickly, each time I had to give slightly different items to each NPC, which was a nice bit of flavor. But I think the best part is solving the 5th iteration of Infinite Adventure and beyond. AUTOPLAY gets you through and pushes the story right when you worry it's sagging a bit. It senses you get the point of how grinding is fun, until it isn't. Plus it signals things are going to go off the rails, both in terms of the game's realism and Em's own frustration.

There's a feeling of just extending time together for its own sake that the game captures well, then there's a flashpoint to what's brewing, because Em and Riley clearly have things they want to say but can't, and the adults in the games help them with that. And in fact you have the option at the end of explicitly not doing anything for Riley, or only doing part of what you can do, which affects the ending you choose. I enjoyed comparing them.

And things like this made ATY so much more than a look back with regret, or nostalgia, or whatever. For starters, I thought of how neat it seemed when I was 5 that a computer could almost sort of have another person inside it, or seem to, but I didn't realize what that realism would entail. Then there are shout-outs to other things from the '80s. They're not joyous, just mentioning, we liked this, but maybe there was better. The Amulet of Werdna is one. Wizardry's a good fit because it never really grew technically or provided a story, and it only slightly became less oppressive for starting players, and you could get nostalgic for it while missing Bard's Tale or Ultima. For me, Wizardry nostalgia was about making unbeatable characters with byte-editing and running through quickly, then discovering sibling folders on Asimov.net for RPGs I'd never heard of--and they were so much better once I had the guts to poke around or pay for an eBay copy of Quest for Clues.

As someone who can listen to one song on a loop, the Journey CD (CDs, wow) with references to newer, more experimental bands ring a bell, too. So the callbacks aren't just to cover retro-cred bases but to say, yeah, this was neat, but a bit was missing. So I had some regret that I never really got to discover BBSes or phreaking or assembly language, but ATY balancing things right still reminded me of long or slow goodbyes to certain friends, and even to ones I thought were my friends. Sometimes that good-bye was expected. Other times, maybe I should've seen it coming. I went to a big high school and had a feeling I'd stop being in classes with some people I'd liked to have seen more of. I had friends who showed me cool things and semi-friends who did, too, but they hid the GOOD stuff, and some of these friends-on-paper made me feel I couldn't share with others, or maybe I didn't deserve to share with others, and I felt the same sort of regret Em seems to if you end things wrong.

But ATY doesn't really dwell on things, or if it does, it makes it clear dwelling is not healthy, even if we can't see anything better. It has four possible endings, based on how well you want to remember Riley. They all bring up how dumb the Infinite Adventure game was but have different levels of contentment. But in any case, it does something good, which is to put in perspective some of the silly stuff I enjoyed, not just computer games, or stuff I played just because it was there or winnable, and that's not something to have nostalgia for. Maybe it was a game my friends and I all got better at until we hit a rough ceiling,and we should've been learning other skills instead. But it's also hinted when the adult characters inside the computer programs indicate that they want to move on, and Em has issues to address.

ATY was a tough one to replay, not due to quality issues, but because it was about how replaying lame stuff or nostalgia in general isn't healthy. The author mentioned in his postmortem a quote that nostalgia is anger misplaced, and I've certainly seen that when I've played through something old and thought "I wish I'd gotten the hint book earlier/had friends to share ideas with," and these thoughts often turn to "I wish I had more to be nostalgic about, like the trickier Infocom games." There are good memories, of course. And we should be able to get a lot of neat things from something that seems stupid on the surface. And looking back, I never realized how many adults I looked up to mixed in anger with their nostalgia. But I also think nostalgia is fear misplaced, or it has been for me. I want to try new things, but not really, just as Em and Riley like Journey, but it's hard to discover new things--what if we don't like the new thing as much? All the while, Infinite Adventure, the safe bet, gets more boring on replay. We're looking for something that isn't there. We do find new stuff, but less each time. I know even old beloved games get old, and sometimes (as with 2400 AD) the best part is finding a clever shortcut to make things go quicker. Narnia and the Chronicles of Prydain, well, I felt sad re-reading and finding nothing really new.

So I definitely worried ATY would have these severe diminishing returns to scale. It should be replayable on paper, but I think I paid enough attention to say: wait, ATY doesn't encourage too much of this sort of thing. I found ATY spurred me to try things I left out--that is the best you can hope for, grabbing onto someone's nostalgia and saying "Hey! I never saw that! I have a chance to now!" whether it's an old game or old video. Perhaps it's literal, where ATY mentions phreaking or some bands I never heard, or it reminds me of friends who said "What!? You never saw popular movie X?" Certainly the isolation ATY provides--the bulk of the real-world game takes part in place--reenforces that some nostalgia I had was itself too self-focused.

I remember on one gaming forum I had friends who liked retro games, but I knew I was looking for something different, and people wrote reviews, and eventually the reviews became more polarized, and the more aggressive personalities cut down favorite nostalgic games like Kickle Cubicle before leaving because "this place got a bit boring, no offense." I'd just never considered the anger angle before. The gradations of anger are reflected nicely in ATY's endings. But I also remember nostalgia as "boy, my friends and I were happy before we got bored of each other" and taking a while to realize we weren't a great long-term fit, and both sides may not have tried hard enough to find people they could grow with. ATY reminded me of several people like that--people I'd like to hook up with, but I wonder if we'd really talk about what we'd done since then and what we want to do, or if we'd get stuck.

I feel I don't have the qualifications to pick apart fully how good the meta-narrative is, but I think it must be Pretty Darned Good, as it reminded me of departures through college and beyond. It reminded me of people who said "keep in touch" and people who meant it, of people I should've gotten on with better. It made me Google a few dimly-rememebered names. I didn't dwell on whose fault it was we didn't get together more. And it made me (re)visit stuff I never got around to, in a way a detailed article or someone saying "OMG you have to listen to this" (or memories of people who bragged they knew it but never gave details--again, maybe a bit of anger on my part here they didn't share) never could. And, of course, it reminded me of the objectively boring things that provided bonds, even if they should not have, on paper. And even if those bonds were with people I ultimately fell out with, for reasons right or wrong, they were still there and far more real than the times I looked at something nostalgic and thought "this should cheer me up." And it should have, on paper, but it didn't.

So games like ATYC are extremely valuable to me. I wind up pushing myself to do or try a bit more than expected, because I don't want to be like Em thinking back too much to how things were, no matter how happy Em is in general. It certainly makes me want to try new things when writing (I worry I get in a rut) or coding (it's so easy to use the old packages you first learned and try to recreate the "Hey! This works!" excitement without trying for that next step) or, well, visiting new places. Works with exotic locales and exciting characters don't do it for me nearly as well. My feeling looking back is that Gardon and the doctor and Ashley don't need to be disturbed, but that also applies to real people and some of their memories, and I know I need that to block out possibilities that don't lead anywhere, to focus on the ones that will.

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Domestic Elementalism, by fireisnormal

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Interesting, clever, compact game involving shuffling the 4 elements, December 3, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

I played the author's 2021 IFComp entry, After-Words, first, and I was intrigued enough to give Domestic Elementalism a look. AW is probably more my thing, but DE is clearly interesting and stylish and worth playing. If you like one, you'll probably like the other. You, as a research witch, come home from a week-long conference to your house not working. You wonder who could've done this, and why. But more importantly, you need to get your house working again. Generally you keep it running by infusing your life force, but starting it from scratch would take too much.

As you might expect from the title, DE plays with the four elements: water, earth, air and fire. You have one room dedicated to each. Water is the bathroom, fire is the kitchen, earth is the bedroom, and air is the living room. There's also an attic, but finding the key to it is one of the first puzzles you encounter. A lot of this is, reductively, dry-goods stuff, but it's interesting. Each item you can put in your inventory has four states based on the elements. Being a witch, you can change them at will--well, sort of. "Orthogonal transformation" isn't available with your life force as depleted as it is, so you're stuck with fire/water or earth/air to start. This seems restrictive at first, but actually it's a handy way not to overwhelm the player. You don't get your powers back until you get in the attic, by which time you're comfortable with the game mechanics.

So there seems to be a lot of trial and error later on, and strictly speaking, that could be true. But thankfully the interface lets you cycle through both the items you carry and their states pretty readily, and if you can do anything special with your current item in its state, a "use this" sort of box pops up. And, of course, it makes sense. You need something sharp to break through the ice covering the oven, or you need something to reach high up, or you need something soft to catch a bird nest in a chimney you need to remove bricks from. This all fits in well with the title--using your control over the four elements to tidy things up. And you don't have to remember what does what, either. DE lists all the forms you've put an item in, so you can see them. Some aren't ultimately useful, but if they were, DE would sprawl too much. The whole interface is, in fact, well done, as it's a six-room affair with two sides of an engine room each leading to two elemental rooms.

At the game's start, I was also worried I had no clue how long it would take, because the first puzzle seemed to take a while. I put this more down to me just getting my bearings. But fortunately there's a gauge in one of the engine rooms that tells you which rooms have been fully repaired. And it's a good feeling as each one gets going again. DE also finds reason to get rid of things you don't need any more, or it mentions that scenery in an elemental room is working well and doesn't need tinkering. So it doesn't feel arbitrary, yet you have enough powers to really experiment, and you can't quite say "Okay, I still need to use this item to make the whole thing abstractly tidy." There is a lot of internal logic to DE, but you don't have to memorize it.

I also guessed the twist at the end, but that's because it was well-clued without hitting you over the head. There's some mystery of who could've done this and why, and with each out-of-place item you find or eventually fix, more is revealed. This leads to a denouement that feels quite appropriate. The game could've ended with a "yay, you win," once you restored all four rooms' power, but there's still a bit of reckoning, I found a small lesson bungling it the first time through. All I can say is my actions were not specific enough at first and likely what may've (narratively) caused things to go wrong in the first place. Without direct spoilers, you have to be careful with magic--you need to take careful notes, but it's not all formulas and experimentation.

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The Last Night of Alexisgrad, by Milo van Mesdag

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Can be played by yourself, but we need more 2-player games like this, December 3, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

Okay, so the cat was out of the bag pretty early that this was intended as a two-player game, and in retrospect, it was signposted pretty clearly by the author's comments, the introduction and, yes, the title, that this wasn't a strategy game, but I ignored these signposts. And I'm pretty glad I did, so there was that surprise. I've had enough neat surprises spoiled. But even if I'd paid full attention, I think I would have enjoyed the experience.

Because I expected an apocalyptic war, something far more fantastic, maybe two ancient kingdoms both pointing to a prophecy that said, well, on this night in Alexisgrad all will be decided, and each is sure the prophecy upholds THEM as the winner. And I'd certainly play something like that by this author. But the actual scenario is far less fantastical: there is the General of the Kingdom's Army and the Dictator of the Republic. You may play as either. If you think "Dictator" is a bit odd, you're right. But also, the king's army outnumbers and has more firepower than the army of a sovereign democracy of sorts, one that broke away from the Kingdom. With feuding factions (Republican and Socialist) that dissolved their government years ago. A look into the mind of the Dictator reveal someone who is power-seeking in her own way. The story certainly looks at certain paradoxes. Did the Dictator really become a dictator to save democracy? It also leaves things largely unsaid, like how Ivanov, the Dictator's rival, may have had better political instincts and thus committed suicide, knowing things were hopeless. And how, with some choices, the Dictator is revealed as selfish, as people who chase power can be, in a monarchy or democracy. Yet the Dictator seems as aware things have gone wrong internally as the General, who notes the inequality despite the republican/socialist aims. She gives the old "we have to try it" line, one I've certainly believed about liberal democracy. But it rings hollow when she says it.

On replay the opening feels like the strongest bit, and in fact that's where the main decisions are made, where maybe even Alexisgrad can be saved. I'm not spoiling this, but I didn't see this and just assumed inevitability and how and why the loss of Alexisgrad was bound to happen. (Note: even if the Republic pushes the kingdom back, they're still obviously always under the gun, long-term.) I feel silly not trying as much as I should've, but I'm grateful for the author mentioning different endings than most reviewers found, and I enjoyed reading the branches in the source to say: oh, yes, that's how this worked, or that worked, and I thought I tried it, but I didn't. Oh, and of course (choice redacted) was, indeed, very silly for one of the characters. There's one negotiation scene that's particularly interesting, where the General suspects or even knows their victory was hollow, because it should've been bigger, or the Dictator's followers are grateful that they only surrendered THAT much. Of course, the Dictator can negotiate badly, too, if she even manages to get where she can negotiate!

At first I found the General and Dictator, for all their power, seem pretty much fixed to behave a certain way, outside of what seem to be a few irrational choices. So I thought LNoA worked well as a "your choices are futile" game (The Dictator can escape with her life or semi-betray the people she serves/rules,) which I've seen before, but obviously there were more choices, which raised it in my estimatin. Even so, it usually starts with big plans which devolve into the General and Dictator facing each other, and you expect 15 years from now, the General and Dictator would be seen in the same light regardless what paths they chose and whether the Dictator was shot on the spot or sent to the King's mercies. And on replay, it seems the Colonel is more formidable than the General, and the Secretary of War/Defense is similarly tougher than the Dictator she advises. Seeing more of them would've been interesting, but the Dictator and General definitely have more interesting dilemmas, and LNoA already gave us a lot.

This sort of thing could get people playing more interactive fiction, because I think it's what interactive fiction can and should be. I say this as someone who prefers the label "text adventure" for most of my stuff. LNoA isn't too stuffy or preachy or high-minded. It takes a cool concept an executes it well. I played by myself but can picture people are interacting as they make choices, both with the story itself, to find the passages through, and with each other. There's a bit of strategizing, and some potential prisoner's-dilemma type strategy (you don't know how aggressively your opponent will bargain,) working together to see if you missed anything. It took me several plays to beat this story into the ground by myself, and I in fact missed a few things. Like the old Zork games before the internet, I could see people playing this poking at their friend to say hey, come on, you can figure out what to do so the Dictator comes out okay.

It's interesting to see who's in charge of things (one side is, more than the other,) and I really liked having to fit the story together in a non-conventional way. Looking back, I got close the first time to a stalemate of sorts. There's an overwhelming feeling of the powerful not only staying powerful but also being able to make it look like they worked hard to earn and keep their power (You are sort of ruthless, if that counts.) But that's a bit simplistic. LNoA seems to have avoided commenting on any important Political Issues of the Day, and I was glad of that, because too often they leave me grumpy whether or not I agree with them. It really does stand out more as something that breaks new ground rather than any sort of political statement, and I'd be glad to play knockoffs if they appeared in 2022.

Final note: A basic (frameset cols="*,*") with two (frame src="main.htm") tags worked very nicely for me to keep track of things on my own. But obviously the experience is better if you don't see everything right away.

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The Song of the Mockingbird, by Mike Carletta

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
A Western for people who don't like Westerns, December 3, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

Don't worry if you don't like Westerns. I don't, and I quickly stopped caring that SotM was one. The emphasis here isn't on Western flavor or what-have-you, though there is plenty of it. Like the previous author's Dynamite Powers vs. the Ray of Night!, it's more about MacGuyvering things, though it's a good deal more serious. I have to admit I remembered the silly fun more than the MacGuyvering, so I hoped the second bit held up, and it does. I also felt the path and plot were a bit clearer, which I think is a combination of both experience as a designer and programmer and the more realistic setting. So I was pleased and unsurprised to see it do so well in the Comp.

Things start out pretty badly for you, Boots Taylor. The Black Blade has kidnapped Rosa, whom you think you've connected with nicely, and you go chasing the gang by yourself. Unsurprisingly, you're ambushed, and while you're hiding, a thug named Ace is throwing canisters at you in order to kill you. The higher-up gang members have business back at the ranch, and you're unarmed, so how hard can it be? While ducking, you sort of wonder how they explode, but more importantly, you're wondering how to disrupt him. That's your first puzzle. Once he's gone, you find a small gold casket you find on his person. Operating it is the first real puzzle, and the game is quite kind saying "okay, next time just use (command)!" Earning points is always nice, but earning a shortcut is an extra bonus!

The casket(Spoiler - click to show), which is really a lighter, helps you kill three more enemies: the gang members who left Ace to kill you. They're all hiding so as not to give anyone a clear shot. But that means if you sneak around right, they don't have one, either. Podge sneaks around the corral, Whitey is on the roof of the barn, and Felipe is on a windmill. These locations, along with a stable where you make friends with a horse (a Western trope, but definitely worthy of a Senor Chang "I'll allow it") hold clues how to kill enemies you can barely see.

All three of these puzzles feel to me very smart, yet not obscure. Upon killing each person, you note they didn't deserve quite a gruesome death (I suppose safety ladders weren't invented back then, leaving Whitey and Felipe having to jump,) but you still find a letter and a key in a pocket on each corpse. Each is used to open a triple-lock (spare a thought for poor Ace, who didn't own one) that leads to the Real Mystery.

Given the time frame (just after the Civil War) there are some call-backs to invoking the Confederacy that feel relevant today. Other reviewers pointed them out a bit better. It's all quite a dirty business aside from that. I may be walking a tightrope avoiding what the Real Mystery is, as I'd like to, but I just want to add, I found the annotations at the end interesting. Some stuff, like the safety powder, I knew, and some I did not. I feel like this is a game I could revisit in a year or so, having forgotten a lot of details, and I would recall enough of it to enjoy it unfolding in a slightly different way. Maybe as a boost before any of 2022's longer IFComp games that might seem intimidating. However, if I had to use a walkthrough, I'd be glad to read the one included with the game. It's a story by itself and manages to avoid the mechanical "move here then here" or even the stronger narration/command back-and-forth. I don't think it would've worked nearly as well if it weren't walking you through such a good story. It asks questions about what you may've noticed, then tells you, and it has a few red herrings worth trying. It's great fun, with a lot of care put in.

Oh, one thing: once you finish, the opening scene makes a bit more sense. You'll probably have forgotten it when you've been engaged in the story.

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Funicular Simulator 2021, by Mary Goodden and Tom Leather

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Sort of public transport, sort of a sightseeing cruise, good fantasy, December 3, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

Earlier in 2021, the New Zealand touristry bureau released this great ad about avoiding cliches when visiting sites: avoiding certain poses or certain shots, and so forth. It's well-done and amusing, as it opens up some questions: why do we go interesting places? Are we really getting anything out of it? Are we getting what we should? How do we get what we should? Funicular Simulator doesn't pretend to answer these questions fully, but it does provide us with ways a sightseeing trip could be more than just something to check off on. In fact, here, it can lead to an entirely new life, or death. And, as Mike Russo's review (which will appear on IFDB in 35 days) invoked for me, it may give a feeling of being on public transport and having your own stuff to do, and yet being open to discussion if the right person is nearby. It helps scratch the itch of wondering what the interesting-seeming person on the bus/train is thinking about, whether you've never seen them before or recognize them on that route. So there are very accessible personal and fantasy elements at play here.

The situation here isn't exactly the daily commute to work or the weekly bus trip to the grocery store, though. You're on the tram to see an aurora that appears every twenty years. Four people around you seem, well, interesting. There's Luke the graphic artist, Sofia the pilgrim, Meena the scientist, and Ray the student. You choose one to start, and the game focuses in on them. Each has their own story. None fully expects you to believe them, and there's no reason to.

Well, until you reach the end of the line. One of the four leads you to a conclusion, and you have a choice of whom to go with, at that point, if you made friends enough. There's a sort of Groundhog Day mechanic at work here. You can mess up a bit, and the person just says they want to be alone, or in the case where someone is romantically interested, you can push them away. And you can try again, if they didn't invite you a bit further. Or you can choose another conversational companion. You know a bit more, and that "Yes, I know what the aurora is for" option is now more viable. Without enough knowledge of the future/past, you don't REALLY know what it's for. The "actually, I don't know" follow-up option disappears. So the same options feel different. Along the way, stuff we know isn't true (aliens, time travel, reincarnation, etc.) becomes believable. Or I want to believe it, or I might as well, and the best part is, there is no scientific mumbo-jumbo.

I found the game-ending choice on the third person through. It was pretty clear they would end things, and I could back out when I wanted. It never quite feels like lawnmowering, though given the content warning, I used process of elimination to figure what was up with my final conversant. Having a bit more meta-information than my own character was maybe not something the authors fully intended to happen, but it gave me another layer of complexity in the whole "looping to find knowledge/resolution" thing, which was neat. I didn't feel there were barriers on what I could or should imagine, either. Things could be possible without me having to explain them. And there were lines like this:

"Oh well," says Sofia. ... She laughs. "I haven't even told you my name! I'm Sofia."

Wait, I thought at first, that's just a clear mis-step. But of course, that's what happens when you cycle through and get to see a conversation more than once. You do know Sofia well due to the cycles the game goes in. I like takes on time paradoxes like this, whether they're heavy or light. I also found some question of whether or not your companions cycled through this train ride up several times, which put a spin on some of their small-talky "but you can't believe this" proclamations. I mean, maybe they learned and remembered a lot by observing you, as well, and it would be weird to explain that back to you.

So we get a lot of potential trippiness with very little "look at me I'm being trippy and showing you The Truth and yet The Truth is fungible" sort of nonsense. This is appreciated. Adding to the effect is the background–I remember tinkering with gradients in Microsoft Office years ago, and it was just fun, but it didn't mean anything. Here the effect is relatively simple and works well. It's sort of sunset-ish, but a bit more than that, and anything too jazzy would've been inappropriate.

The undo command allows you to see all five possible endings (go with anyone or stay by yourself) so you can get a feel for the narrative, and yet at the same time you feel as though you've earned it. Though I like logic puzzles, I'm glad there wasn't any huge logic puzzle to unlock each ending, more just asking questions and trying things out. There aren't many puzzles, but I liked how the bit with the scientist's chronon tracker worked, both how it was laid out and how you could find something if you were clever. You had to set a reading to a certain number, which was not bad with trial and error, but that wasn't everything.

I can't be the only IFComper who looks at the entries next to me alphabetically, to see if I'm in good company. Fine Felines before me was quite enjoyable, and I'm happy to report so was Funicular Simulator. (They wound up placing next to each other, too!) But it goes beyond just "wow, that's neat." Funicular Simulator is a game on the very surface about interesting people sitting next to you to learn from on a ride, thrown together by chance, and it has a bit more. You can bug whom you want to bug, and nobody will get annoyed. And, to me, it's a heck of a lot more interesting and involving than a luxury cruise could ever be. You get to ask questions and not worry if they're the wrong ones, and you never feel as though someone's waiting to pat your hand and saying "sweetie, there are no wrong questions or answers. No, really, not even yours."

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Codex Sadistica: A Heavy-Metal Minigame, by grave snail games

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Several grades above scrap metal, for sure, December 3, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

So I was worried this game would be much darker than it actually turned out to be. Well, perhaps heavy-metal-hating adults from my youth who insisted there were Satanic messages in there, or at the very least it wasn't the sort of thing that helped you be productive in society, would disagree. But it did turn out to be sort of supernatural and dark, or at least, that's the fate that was threatened. It never actually happened. And yes, this effort is about heavy metal music and various subgenres, but this didn't stop my clueless self from enjoying it, and it shouldn't stop you.

You're at a heavy metal club and are very upset your own "real' metal band is being kept off the stage by a very long glam-metal performance. You need to get back on-stage. This is harder than it seems. The lead singer of the glam-metal band is, in fact, more than just a selfish jerk. Your problem? You'll need all your band members together to have the force to do so. They're all distracted by something silly. Emmy, your guitarist, is upset her Switch is low on power. Mae, your cousin ("and more importantly, your drummer") is being accosted by – horror of horror – dudebros out in the back. Tamm's brother insists on playing D&D with her. Clover and Max stuck themselves in a closet to avoid a stalker. All this must be settled before you go on stage. And there's a "horrible" secret why the glam-rock band is so popular: the lead singer is worse than the dudebros. A demon, in fact.

Evasive action must be taken so that the club and, indeed, the world avoids a horrible fate. The key command to use here is JAM: once you jam correctly with a fellow band member, they're willing to do what it takes to get on-stage. JAM also meshes different subgenres of metal into a third. All this is beyond me, and apparently the hybrids aren't relly related to the originals, but it's all in good, clear fun. Clear enough that even an uninitiate like me could understand it.

Minor vandalism is required. You must burn a poster for Acid Lobotomy (there really is a band named this! It's too perfect,) but the game notes they would've wanted it that way. You and Mae have a very detailed discussion about heavy metal minutae that can't possibly appeal to outsiders, but it does here, because it's obviously overdone, and it's used to leave the dudebros bothering her in the dust.

The game map itself isn't very big–it's one of those packed music clubs, after all. So you could trial-and-error everything except the puzzle noted in spoilers. I was worried it might be something much, much bigger due to the word "Codex," but really, I think it's about the right size.

I'm pretty sure I missed out on some of the joke details, and I had no clue whether or not jamming created different fusions of metal styles. But I didn't mind. It's a fun little romp of good (but not, like, sickeningly or boringly good) vs. evil. I very much enjoyed it, and I'm speaking as someone who doesn't really enjoy live music, especially loud live music. I'd almost say the game's good harmless fun, but somehow, that seems like exactly the wrong compliment. Perhaps I get all the excitement of crowds without, well, having to deal with crowds. At any rate, I think the author did a good job of articulating the excitement and humor of metal culture, probably better than I would do discussing college sports fandom or chess ("That Carlsbad pawn structure, eh? Eh?") And I'm glad I played it, as if it hadn't been in IFComp, I'd likely have said, eh, heavy metal? I'll pass.

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Cyborg Arena, by John Ayliff

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
You've played this before, without all the technology--well, sort of, December 3, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

Cyborg Arena has an unusual symmetry you will probably see if you play through a few times, and it's not hard to. On the surface it's a small competition: a cyborg-on-cyborg fight, for human entertainment. You get to choose your name and weapon (I suspect the flamesaw is a crowd and player favorite) and then spend a few rounds fighting your opponent. The major twist is that you (Spoiler - click to show)know your opponent and have fought them before, multiple times. You and they are more than friends. Throughout the fight, the crowd grows more or less excited. You have flashbacks of how you met your opponent and how cyborg fights have become kosher, and on multiple times through, you get very different endings based on how friendly you were, or how excited you keep the crowd. So you can play explicitly to win or to lose.

It's not hard to beat your opponent, since you can read them pretty well even if you didn't make friends with them. They have three moves, and each move beats one other--yes, even in technologically advanced society, 1) rock-paper-scissors is a thing and 2) peole can be suckered into wasting time and money watching it. There are bells and whistles, of course. But we know what it is at its heart. There's a bit more, too: smashing your opponent's health bar and running up the score isn't necessarily the point. Keeping the crowd cheering loudly is a different mechanic that you have to experiment to get right, and it affects your ending. I managed to completely outmaneuver my opponent and still get killed, for instance. On multiple playthroughs, it struck me that the "twist" in the battle, which was apparently a first, well, wasn't. (Spoiler - click to show)It was the first ever fight to the death. But the crowd wanted it to be, and arguing the point in the middle of a fight would, of course, be worse than hopeless. Successfully subverting the "twist," in fact, only makes the crowd roar louder. They think they understand your story, but they don't, really. They see brave fighters, but the story is complex because of how cyborgs have been treated.

Certainly, with what the story reveals about cyborgs and cyborgs' rights, the best you can do is be their favorite second-class citizen. Cyborgs had been granted personhood in the near future, but later, they'd gotten it stripped. This brought up a lot of issues for me, not because I'm a cyborg (I'm not,) but because I've had acceptance pulled away from me. Sometimes that acceptance was in good faith, and sometimes it wasn't. Sometimes I still felt second-class despite that acceptance. And I'm also reminded of how some (seemingly) popular kids loved to disrupt less-popular kids' friendships in high school, just for entertainment. Maybe popular isn't the right word here. They probably just understood power better than most. Well enough to get deference from everyone. But they also knew how to manipulate people just long enough to ruin a friendship. Here, it's institutional. There's a constant prodding for you not to trust other cyborgs, not even your friend who repeatedly helps you, and I think the diverging storylines worked well with the actual fights. It's so easy to do what's expected of you, but pulling yourself away to find an unexpected friendship–or one louder, nastier people would mock–or to help someone you should be competing with, is hard. You can blow your friend off, with the fight taking a very different tone.

And you can, of course, flip the script on its head, playing to lose, or even allowing your enemy to be the one to kill you and make the decisions. It was, to say the least, a bit different when I was at their mercy. So I got a lot more than I expected out of what seemed to be a dystopian sci-fi where robots fight and the crowd cheers. It's presented so straightforwardly it's hard not to get sucked in and give a few tries. But the funny thing: once I thought I'd tried lots of anti-establishment things against the repressive government behind the cyborg arena, I realized I never had let my friend win or come close to winning. Despite choosing some high-minded, selfless options during the flashbacks. And it's sort of scary how, even in a simulation with nothing concrete to lose, you can still do for you.

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Grandma Bethlinda's Remarkable Egg, by Arthur DiBianca

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
It's like your usual DiBianca game, except different, in all the good ways, December 3, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

After several years, you may think you know what you're going to get from a DiBianca game, but maybe not. I say this as someone who's enjoyed beta testing his games before. They're already in quite good shape by the time I get them. I like the surrealism with more than enough backstory to allow for a nice variety of puzzles. And I like being able to get through the basic ending, then the more-fun full ending. There will be challenges, but I don't have to do everything the first time through. I know I saved GBRE for later after completing the easy part first. And, for the author's usual efforts, it is unexpectedly easy to get the basic end. But then again the author also leaves much tougher puzzles out there for those who want to stretch themselves.

You've managed to handcuff yourself without a key, but fortunately Grandma Bethlinda's Egg has just about everything you could expect from a mechanical egg, including lockpicks ... if you can figure how to open it. The egg, however, needs you to run diagnostics. Not too many, but enough to keep you busy. Each one opens up new commands, which may or may not be necessary for your immediate needs. A small puzzle with 3 variable letters in a 7-letter word is one example I'll focus on. There are a few ways to do it: one is to write a program that spits out all the combinations and compares it to my words file. Another is to write a script that grinds through all the possibilities with the commands. An example would be:

* change slot 1 3 times
* change slot 2 once
* steps 1, 2, 1, 2, 1
* change slot 3
* steps 3, 4, 3, 4, 3

Or, of course, you can just have fun with trial and error. There's a balance here. Too much brute force, or too many programs, is no fun. I tend to get a good blend of regular problem-solving and coding tries. I enjoy the meta-game of balancin things. There's also another puzzle where the egg is dirty and needs cleaning. But you need the right temperature of steam. So you VENT or WAIT for several turns, which heats things up or cools things down. It's an arithmetic problem, really, as VENT cuts the temperature in half. But it's a fun one, and I wound up getting the right temperature a mve early, which wasn't good enough. Figuring out what I missed was rewarding. It feels like it should be busy work, but it never quite is, and the author has a good intuitive feel for mixing things up, for starting with received knowledge and moving on to trickier things, and also talking effectively to the reader.

I got a basic good ending, which was enough. I knew there was obviously more. I was unable to print out the manual, which the game lampshades pretty early on. You don't have any paper to feed the egg, you see. But there are other things: a racecar that doesn't want to fall off a table and a mechanical dog that ... well, it seems fun. There are 21 or so bonus endings and more than 50 verbs to use or find. That sets the stage for a lot of experimentation. I admit I was a bit short of time, so on replay, I looked at some of the tricker puzzles. While the author's shown humor before in his puzzles, it's more explicit here, and you can't just sit down and calculate everything. There are timing puzzles, as well as puzzles for taking the right things out of the egg (too many, and it says you need to bring some back in.) There's even a survey you can (again!) brute-force, and I really liked the puzzle to get the egg to 100% commands. You control a microbot going up it, and the microbot can only describe the items blocking its way. From that, you have to order the egg to expel certain things, so the microbot can move forward. There's more lateral thinking than usual here, because GBRE gives you all the achievements' names, and you have to guess the right verb(s) or, more often, the combination of egg commands to get stuff done. Some experiments don't quite work, and that's kind of funny too.

Usually I tackle a Grandma Bethlinda game 100% right away, but then I didn't usually want to try to complete all IFComp games. GBRE isn't the first entry where you know you've missed something and you can put it off until later, but you do know roughly what you've missed, and it's easiest to play around with in your head, because all the pieces are there. And one other note: before looking at it, I flipped back through old issues of the New Zork Times. The author mentioned he'd gotten a letter published. It was about how A Mind Forever Voyaging was nice but light on the puzzles he'd come to expect, compared to Zork, etc. Perhaps someone may feel GBRE goes off in a different branch as well, one it shouldn't, one they didn't expect, and history will show that yes, GBRE offers something neat Arthur DiBianca's other games don't. I enjoyed the different humor after first saying, wait, there's a bit more lateral thinking and a lot less number/logic crunching than I expected. But whether the next Grandma Bethlinda related game is heavy on pure logic or lateral thinking or, more likely, has a neat balance of both, I'm looking forward to it.

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The Vaults, by Daniel Duarte

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Not really a text adventure, but fun if you know what to expect, December 3, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

Full disclosure: I tested The Vaults after IFComp was over, so I've been able to see a lot that wouldn't be accessible in two hours. I think I've worked well with the author, and he's been attentive about bug fixes--he even responded positively to a one-star review! I've enjoyed my time through it, and again. So this review will be a combination of my IFComp experiences and why it placed where it did, as well as a look forward, and things that are fixed if you want to check out The Vaults now. TLDR: there's a lot more player help and balance.

Within the two-hour judging limit (I think,) I got my keepers to level 2 in The Vaults. I saw basically what was going on: you have little three mini-ghost keepers, replete with hoods, who go about a terrain and fight adorably grouchy little knocker goblins. They're bluish and keel over and grimace further when they die, which is quite frequently. I even managed to gain my keepers armor and gauntlets. The armor cost one maximum hip point, which shows the author has put effort into balancing things in addition to, well, getting such a massive effort to work.

From a gaming perspective, I enjoyed The Vaults very much, but as a text adventure or perhaps freeware, it's wanting. It's in Unity and takes a while to load--longer than Cygnet Committee, Silicon and Cells or Mermaids of Ganymede. There are in-game purchases, which is just fine for a game that is going to Steam, but other people found it iffy. The ethical considerations here are tricky: you won't see all of the game in two hours, especially with all the special effects, but if you buy a pricey item, you can move forward quickly and thus be able to judge more! I think The Vaults unintentionally found a loophole that should be closed. I doubt this was through malice. The author probably saw, hey, there's a contest for unreleased games that starts just as my game is scheduled to release! So I think IFComp needs to re-evaluate its stance on in-game purchases. Competitors shouldn't feel pushed to make them in the name of fairness. This is far less black-and-white than releasing a game before comp start or actually charging, but I think now we've seen it, we need a future rule.

However, the main reason this game didn't work for IFComp is that it wasn't really text-based at the time. The big text gulps are before you go exploring, and then the screen times out before your next fight. It's possible to take a screenshot, but it shouldn't be. A few tutorial dialogues popped up but not enough to help you understand what was going on. Often text would disappear after some time out, or I'd just want to get through the splash-screen before the next fight and suddenly realized that text might be valuable! So having an information, umm, vault full of these screenshots would be nice. There are starting tutorials, but I wasn't in a position to really understand what they mean until you play a few fights. The game precluded you from doing certain things, too, such as attacking when attack power is zero and now I've gotten through it a bit, it's obvious to me, but not newer players. I almost gave up, and I maybe would've, too, if those poor cute knocker goblins hadn't shown terrible strategic reasoning by attacking me. I eventually decided to see what would happen if I just sat around and let them kill me, and at that point I realized what some of the numbers around the combatants meant.

All this is done much better now, though it's still light on text. Having said that, the graphics are good enough to figure what the red, blue, green and purple are for without text. I did it myself! Thankfully, you won't need to any more.

As it was, I assembled a deck by trial and error (it's now automated--your default cards go to a default deck), and I got bopped pretty badly as I pushed forward outside the first area. So I stuck with knocking around (ha!) the poor knockers goblins, deal with summons, and attack only when it's useful. I was overwhelmed by who did what at first, and again, there are helpful popup boxes now. The author's done a lot of this--allowed for more detailed graphics or animations, or just "hey! Here's the treasure from those twenty chests!"

The Vaults is an impressive piece of programming. I get a sense of strategy that interested me, even though I'm not big on card games. But I definitely wasn't in the right frame of mind for it, and given how I wound up grinding in the first area, the story was almost non-existent. It only unfolds with each new area and tougher monsters. That said, I did get to the end of the second map with a clear idea of what was going on. Even then, I hadn't explored duel mode or really used the Forge, which combines items (you get experience, and it costs gold) into more powerful ones. You also get to choose a specialization class later.

So The Vaults is a bit heavy on the technical effects, and thus it put itself at a severe disadvantage in a text-based contest such as IFComp. I feel like a goon playing gatekeeper and saying "IFComp isn't the right place for this game" because, after all, I did enjoy it. But all the same, given that the author has ambitions to put the game on Steam, I suspect the game's placing will be outweighed by the utility of any bugs judges find and report. I've learned a lot about the whole RPG creation process. And at any rate, it's really cool to be able to say I sincerely enjoyed my time testing both the first- and last-placed games in IFComp 2021, albeit for different reasons.

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Recon, by Carlos

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Fast-paced, but critical parts may zoom past the 1st time, December 2, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

Recon has maybe the coolest stand-alone puzzle in the whole comp: the bookcases that clue you to a computer's password. It's a funny moment for me, and yet, it doesn't feel quite right in something with the plot of Recon--how you're a rebel leader who plans to meet up with his girlfriend at a bar in a dystopian Baltimore, but she is missing. Cue warnings that the police, or rather the restrictors under the control of a large conglomerate called Faro, know about the meeting followed by a chase through the city and up to an earthscraper, in order to find allies and information to see where and, eventually, why your mate disappeared. Along the way you-the-player also learn why you are so motivated to take down Faro.

There are plenty of ways to die, and quite frankly, they're interesting and fill in a part of the plot that playing through can't. There's a real choice between disguising yourself fully and getting a bionic arm. Each gives different puzzles, which feel a bit like the author showing off technical prowess, but they're also effective, and many give a sense that you need to hurry. While a torture scene felt a bit clumsy and was thankfully not explicit, there was certainly the expectation you had to abuse your captive just right, balancing threats and violence, which was a bit unpalatable but certainly created tension.

We don't get to see a whole lot of dystopian Baltimore, but there's certainly enough: checkpoints, smuggling and the like. The main reveal is inside a biological/cyborg-ish research facility. While it explained why your girlfriend X was missing, I really didn't grasp the whole story until I played through a few times and did some proofreading for the author. Meeting X, your girlfriend, felt a bit flat, too. People's reactions to traumatic and irreversible incidents don't feel right. But the thing is: there is, in fact, a happiest ending, with a surprise at the end if you survive. Check that: two surprise endings. One is about your pet/friend Blanco, and it always shows up. The other can be happy or sad.

And I think one thing originally off-putting about the game was that I shoehorned myself into final choice where neither really made me happy. It does have a save feature, but all the same, I thought this was The Ending. Some of this may be since things get lost in translation ("thanks for your time" after a dramatic ending is polite, but Recon is not a polite game) and the blurb and game mention too much about the "social and economic gap," which isn't the way to keep things fast-paced. Recon does better when it shows this, via a flare-up at a city border checkpoint. There might be a bit too much "Hey, here's where we go next" dialogue as well. And in some cases, the tries at quick "let's hurry" dialogue fell flat to me, like when you leave a tied-up captive behind. But we have pretty clear cases of betrayal among family and friends, and that's a good foundation for a story. And there are a lot of ways to die, which feels appropriate, given the high stakes and the dystopian feel I assume the author wants to give. These ways added color to the Baltimore the author envisioned, and so if some felt a bit out of the blue, I was glad for the detour (you get bumped back to the chapter's beginning) and the explanation that, yes, Faro's power is pretty stifling! The part where you contact another rebel leader, Olga, felt very good too. There's a third character that adds drama and tension.

I have to admit I wasn't clear on if Blanco, your companion, was an actual cat, or more like Red Dwarf's cat, or something in-between. I may have missed it. In fact, I did miss something critical about Blanco the first time through. But Blanco is a trusty sidekick in fights and makes for an interesting character I'd have liked to see more of. Perhaps Recon's too-puzzly puzzles made me miss out on a few details, or perhaps I was tired when I played it. I needed a re-read to understand things, but on the other hand, it was fast-paced enough that it was no problem, and if you enjoyed either disguising yourself or accepting a bionic arm, you have a ready-made path through with the other option. So that should work out well.

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Unfortunate, by Anonymous

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Missed opportunities--in relationships and gameplay, December 1, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

Every year in IFComp there are a couple games with great ambition and obvious promise that have techincal errors, so things never shine through. Unfortunate is such a game this year. Without the bugs, it would be neat and bold, but with them, unfortunately, there's an additional puzzle of working out the right order to do things in so the story isn't dead-ended. With more testing it could've been quite interesting, and I'd have been more eager to try different endings. It's sad the author wasn't able to find testers.

In Unfortunate, you're at a party with 7 other people you give fortunes to. Once you do, things start happening. Someone drops a salsa jar. People make romantic plays for each other. There's almost a breakup. Then things wind down with a short timed puzzle at the end. Sadly, this timed puzzle can be started at the beginning, which hosed the causality for everything else. But as Unfortunate isn't very long, it's not bad to restart and try again and make sure that people don't disappear before they have their resolution. As things turned out, I was exploring and experimenting so much that I forgot to do a few simple nice things for people. The party bombed, and all my predictions (I spammed 1's, which seemed the most dire) came true. I scored 7 of 7 points! So I both totally won and totally didn't. This charmed me. Unforunate had several different ways through, clearly.

I admit, though, I had to decompile the game to see some of the text. As-is, the game offers helpful advice for compass-direction exits but doesn't mention two places where you need to go IN. So this threw me off one trail. Then I found a record in a closet and played it, but it was meant to bring two people back together--two that had disappeared. However, once I knew what scenery was relevant, things made sense. There are a lot of details that are well-observed but may not work well for parser fiction, or they might even be better with twine, e.g. you could highlight important items or closets with a link. Some nooks are important and some, like the shower in the bathroom, aren't. There's a lot of meaningful care given to certain details, which leads me to believe the author didn't know quite what to look for or where to ask for guidance, and they did the best they could, and that's not a backhanded compliment. But it's not enough to make Unfortunate playable without serious aid.

You see, there are games where I shrug and say "oh I guess they wanted to do that, that makes sense" and others where I'm genuinely disappointed for the author they didn't make things smooth enough, yet. And this falls in the second category. I obviously stumbled on an odd way to do things, going out of order because I just poked around to make a map, and I finally got my bearings in the bedroom, which was meant for later in the game. But Murphy's Law is cruel that way.

There's a thread on the intfiction.org forums of what order you need to do stuff in so Unfortunate doesn't go belly-up. It's worthwhile. And most of what you need to do is something that feels natural--but there are so many things, you may wind up forgetting something, leaving you with nothing to do. Unfortunate could use an update then, even post-comp, and I'm sad the author may've looked at the placing and decided this sort of thing wasn't for them. But if you have the patience to tiptoe around a few game-breaking bugs or learn from where others fell, there's a good experience to be had.

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At King Arthur's Christmas Feast, by Travis Moy

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
I'd read more branching interpretations like this of classical works, December 1, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

I imagine a lot of us have heard of Cliff's Notes, those dreary little pamphlets that helpfully summarize plays and novels and poems assigned in English class. They seem to give you a good idea of what's going on in a tough piece of literature without any risk of actually feeling immersed.

"Don't read the Cliff's Notes! You're only ripping yourself off! Teachers will know if you do!" was the adults' battle cry. Oh, plagiarism was bad too. And yes, plagiarism is still bad, but these warnings didn't really teach us how to balance legitimate learning you can't do on your own with our own thoughts, and I think a sadly high percentage of kids knew what the teachers wanted. Stuff that would show the teachers they thought for themselves, because it worked last year for other students they knew.

But I wanted more. I wanted something that would illuminate. It felt greedy. I remember playing some not very good Narnia choice-games on the Apple. Some had minimal dice-rolling. One had an action game at the end that actually required effort to lose. I recognized, even at a young age, what a money-grab it was, but I still wanted more, and later when I found the Asimov archive, I still played the Narnia game I'd missed.

And we have them now. Some are interactive, but some aren't. I remember finding an Internet comic that summarized Ulysses. Obviously, it missed a few finer points, but it helped a lot. I needed the help.

And I think works like AKACF do that, and well. I've read Gawain and the Green Knight--Tolkien's version, at least--but it was so long ago I forgot most of it. And part of me felt uneasy that he was a bit too much of a Good Guy. AKACF gives him the option to behave poorly, replete with nagging noblemen and ladies who tempt him to. It doesn't drag on, but certainly it gives me a feel for the "why not just give in and get on with it" that we sometimes feel before making a bad choice, and yes, that is part of morality. Curiosity for the wrong things is universal, as is saying "Oh, I know what I'm supposed to do, but it seems so boring," and how do we resist that? Yet, even if you act terribly, Gawain never comes off too badly. That'd be too much authorial interpretation. However, when he strays from the path, different things happen than in the original poem, and I think the branches are both fair and interesting. The author is still pretty much faithful to what would've happened, but just asks "what if Gawain gives in a little?"

As for the story: a mysterious green knight appears on Christmas day. He tells King Arthur, hey, cut my head off, but Arthur can't bring himself to. Gawain offers to and does. The price is: within a year and a day, Gawain must find the knight and accept a similar blow. He has no clue where to look. But with time running out, he manages to find a castle where the lord takes him in. The lord's wife attempts to seduce Gawain, and here I'll draw a spoiler veil to mention the choice between behaving better or worse than Gawain is pretty clear. You can even utterly ignore the lady of the castle. The lord knows where the Green Knight is, and yes, Gawain finds him and faces his fate.

Being able to do walk through Gawain's choices leaves me with much more of a feeling than "good guys gonna good-guy," so it was a success on that alone. I largely glossed over the bits that the author put in a content warning for. That's my style in general. At least, the first time. But once I'd gotten through, I appreciated being able to look through things by chapter, again, and even change the critical choices you made in, say, chapter 5 before trying chapter 6. It's nice to be able to lawnmower alternate story lines or pick them off a la carte, and while AKACF is worth re-reading, I'm glad it's very not-thirsty about it all. I've left so many games I meant to look at again because the effort to start up would be too much. While it's obviously nontrivial to draw this up as an author, it gives accessibility without ruining any surprises, so I encourage it. Here, you will probably want to tweak how well Gawain behaves without having to re-pay your dues.

I really wish I'd had this sort of thing for tougher literary works when I was a kid, and I hope other people follow the author's example and make something interactive like this. While gutenberg.org is all well and good for the latest classical work I want to read but never got around to, it seems like there's a lot of fertile ground for other works. In addition, ChoiceScript seems well-suited to changing these options--this is dryly stated, but in a nutshell, this is what happens. And it sounds trivial to write until you sit down and do it and have familiarity with the source text. Still, providing these what-if options seems like an achievable goal for many potentially tricky classical works, and I hope to see more works interpreted in this way, whether for IFComp or general consumption.

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we, the remainder, by Charm Cochran

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A good deal more than just "cults are bad, mmkay", December 1, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

wtr establishes the whole oppression angle early on: you start as one of four sisters in a decrepit apartment, one you're not encouraged to leave, even though your Momma doesn't seem to be anywhere around. And once you leave, you're in a gated community anyway. A decrepit one: dogs in the street, lack of food, and so forth. So the mystery is: what are you doing here? And, of course, can you get out? Well, there's a hunger puzzle to begin, and if you strictly explore and map things out, you'll die of hunger. But fortunately it's not hard to find food that'll sustain you for a while, before you find food that works indefinitely. This "find something good then something better" contrasts with the general tone, where you'll find something bad and, yes, it's even worse.

Exploring your enclosed town, you find clues of what life is like, with a schoolhouse, a pavilion, and many reminders of What Happens to Sinners. In particular, nosing around places that'd be off-limits with adults around give you painful memories, where the screen turns red, if you search enough. It becomes clear what your life situation is like, and the only big question is if this is a full dystopia or this community is unique. Of course, this is one you-the-character don't want to think of right away.

As you explore the town, you learn about the Prophet Hunter and his influence on the community. He said everyone would be taken to heaven and, well, they sort of were. You find the key to his house, which is better stocked than his followers'. You find a way past rabid dogs. There's also a woman whom you feel guilty gazing at, and it introduces a strain of legitimate supernatural interference if you keep annoying her. This made wtr more than just a smackdown of cults because none of this could happen--some of it, it wtr's world, could.

The game's feel is parser-like even though it's in twine. You have compass directions, and you'll see text on the left edge if there's a path west, and so forth, which makes a map easy to visualize, and it also gives a perception of distance. You have to move the mouse a good deal to actually go west. The occasional item use similarly just needs clicks, though it's kept in the center, and with all wtr threw at me, I was grateful not to have verb- or noun-guessing to wrestle with as well. I found the background color changes are quite effective as well. There's green for the farm area, purple for the Prophet Hunter's house, and different colors for the streets. I don't think detailed graphics would work well here because the main character has been sheltered and thus pays attention to little beyond their own survival. I suspect even the ASCII map of the town you find early in the game clues you in to how backwards this commune is. The map by itself is pleasing, but then you have to ask, who would've created it, and why? While a time frame isn't given in the game, I can't picture any era where normal society would go with an ASCII map instead of something more graphical. Here it feels like the time I visited the DPRK government website and noticed a link to forms in Esperanto--not the nice or useful touch the creator (in-game, not the author) thinks it is!

While you can die of starvation or of sacrilege, the game's true ending is--well, a success, of sorts. There's a big gate. You need to go through it, for salvation, of a sort. The tool(s) you use for this relative freedom are, ironically, symbols of strength and unity, but in this case, they're just one more thing that makes it hard for people to pull away.

wtr also offers seven different places to find memories that break open that much more of how cult life really is. The walkthrough mentions them and avoids saying where they are, and I like this procedure, because I know I can have everything spoiled if I'm not too careful. And if you manage to escape without the memories, perhaps you're like the main character, just doing what you need to survive. There's some learned helplessness at work here for the player: you don't want to search for local flavor when looking for endless food, but once you find it, you forget about looking around until you've escaped and can't and don't want to go back. So this surviving vs actually noticing details really struck me once I looked back. How I could've been more observant, but I just wanted to get out. And going through again reminded me of times I'd replayed bad episodes in my life, looking for that memory of cruelty that would clinch things. Sometimes I found it and realized it wasn't necessary, but it was comforting.

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The Last Doctor, by Quirky Bones

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A too-brief moral dilemma, November 30, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

This quick effort provides a few moral dilemmas a doctor faces but doesn't explore them as much as I had hoped, given the strong good introduction. You're a doctor in some sort of war-zone. You have a choice of how much to treat your current patient. Treat them properly, and you have no resources for the next patient. Don't treat them, and maybe you can treat more. But will it be satisfactory? The patient seems grateful either way.

The next day, the warlord responsible for the huge conflict comes in, with his posse. He's close to critical. You have the choice to treat him or not (he says he understands, since you're helping the rebels, and nobody will harm you even if he dies.) Either choice you make, he comes back later, offering you a position where you have more resources and can treat more people better. The dilemma, of course, is whether healing soldiers aligned with an oppressive system will, in fact, do more damage.

The themes are treated a bit lightly, as I see it. I don't know if I buy that the soldiers you treat aren't wounded quite as badly if you help the big boss. It reminds me of the flip side of Saki's The Storyteller where the kids say "but wouldn't people have helped her even if she weren't bad?" Perhaps the boss orders less flesh-cutting bullets, or even fewer head shots, but even so that doesn't stop the war. It feels a bit like bullies backing off when security guards are watching.

Without more details, it's impossible for the reader to divine the boss's intent fully, but on the other hand, you've been helping for a long while, according to the story. So you should know something about what the boss does, how he does it, and maybe even how much fault people on your side have for the whole mess.

So trying for a fable- or thought-experiment-like effect ("help 5 mean people or 4 nice ones?") really doesn't quite work for me, here. It feels like there should have been more, and I expected it, from the first interactions with the patient. But it felt like maybe the author ran up against a time deadline and wanted to send in something complete. And it is, but it feels a bit workmanlike after the first patient.

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After-Words, by fireisnormal

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Brevity: Wit-soul. Layout: inventive. Experience: absorbing., November 30, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

After-Words is the sort of sharply designed and presented game that takes a while to get used to. It's almost too slick to adjust to at once. I was clueless how to do that first thing, but then, everything clicked. There's a tidy map with lock icons by passages you need to open. There are two buttons on the main page: look and interact. You build an inventory and use it on people or items you find--dry goods stuff, perhaps, but not dry writing. And the writing is largely in two-word phrases. And it all works.

Because the wordlessness is part of the quest: you, the Resolver, need to bring words back to Skycity, where there's plenty of activity but little spoken. What words there are create a vivid world. There are all sorts of flies, as well as other surreal things like gunflowers (they are rusty and need oil to defend the city properly, and once they do, security stops blocking you from going elsewhere) or robogulls or hammerspiders, or glowdoves who give you eggs you need to hatch. This all sounds like it could be a mess I had to use a bit of trial and error, but the cool thing was: there weren't a ton of errors to make! And After-Words tersely lets you know when you can't use something. "USE ELSEWHERE." Though some items, like a hammer, give amusing variants (VIOLENCE UNNECESSARY) or location-based text (I was almost sad to give the prismheart up!)

The map itself is nifty, with arrows protruding from your current location. You can click on them to get around or hover over a location to see its name, though most of the time, the location's icon should remind you what it is. This is a big help once you've explored the whole city and have a lot to remember, and all the locks that indicate a temporarily blocked passage have fallen away. Since there is some fetching to do, I was mildly disappointed I couldn't click on the location and move there, or maybe use arrows to get around and L/I for LOOK and INTERACT, because there were so many other conveniences. But it was pretty slick, all told. And I appreciated the "hint" command at the top that told you where to go next. I used it a few times the first time through, but revisiting it for this review, I remembered bits and pieces of the logic and was able to piece things together. My main problem was forgetting to INTERACT fully after solving a quest or helping someone. They'd often offer you an item, but it wouldn't go right in your inventory.

You don't need many words to figure what to do in the big picture. There are three gates near corners of the city that need Big Items (Moon, Blood and Summer,) and they're in the corner, behind a few locked doors, of course.

The only problem I had was that once After-Words got clicking, it was pretty much over. I was almost sad to see my exploits had cost the city its brief charm! But maybe there'll be a sequel. I think I really appreciated the lack of forced logic or received wisdom in the puzzles, though, because on my second play-through, I only had a vague idea of what was where. This felt about right. I enjoyed winning a trophy at the football stadium, counting fractalseeds to acquire another prize, recharging a judge with the right battery, and helping dancers down from being too happy (the relaxed discoball on doing so made me laugh, too.) It's a good-enough sized game at six-by-six, but not so much that too many possible alternative uses for an item pop up and frustrate you.

An aside about myself: the 2015 game The Problems Compound suffered, according to one tester, from AGI-itis, where you "just take one item and use it on someone else, and so forth." While I'm proud of what I wrote, I was glad to see a different strain of AGI-ish game pop up and be done so effectively. It sort of justifies my decisions to make such a "USE X ON Y" game. But I see the clear and obvious appeal of a game like After-Words. It was the sort of thing I was aiming for, and if you aren't doing anything tricky with the parser, I think it works better in a graphical interface than a textual one.

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The Daughter, by GioBorrows

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Much lost in translation (I think), November 30, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFcomp 2021

I got a bit confused by this one, and from other reviews, it seems like I'm not the only person. A very promising premise fizzles out quickly. While staying young's been done in Brave New World, and I remember a short story by Martin Amis where homosexuality became the norm and reproduction was an arduous process, The Daughter combines these concepts and throws immortality on top. Not only that, everyone's been immortal for a while, and there's no age when people grow old and die, to be replaced by others. This brings up a lot of different, interesting issues. For instance, nobody remembers how to bring a child up.

So how do people react to stuff that's totally new to them, but we take it for granted? This applies to both the issues of murder and the childbirth. I suppose someone had to see a child some time, but it was 2500 years ago, and immortality without infinite memory means you forget a lot. And won't the world get overcrowded if nobody dies?

But The Daughter never really explores these issues. The main incident also seemed a bit foggy and didn't have the emotional impact it should have, too. Why did it happen? I have my guesses, but it's unresolved. There are parts which could be very funny indeed even if they don't fit the tone established e.g. "There seems to be a weird obsession on true crime stories in pre-immortal society." This sort of thing seems to reinforce that, even though English is not the writer's first language ("hot 30 year olds" seems unintentional, though,) they have an eye for the important, but maybe they just got a bit glib here or rushed it. But when the story describes everyone as looking like "hot 30 year olds," I expect the translation may be off-base.

And The ending seemed abrupt. I read back to see why it should be. I didn't get the significance of the hotel--was the main character accepting his own mortality?

I checked off with other reviews on this, because it felt like it should have been more than it was. Joey Acrimonious's review in particular articulated some concerns I had. It feels like the author had a relatively strong vision and the ability to get it across, but they didn't. I'd be interested to hear more from the author, because despite my criticisms, this doesn't feel close to a total throwaway. Just be prepared to be let down by a sudden end.

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My Gender Is a Fish, by Carter Gwertzman

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Self-exploration in 15 minutes or less, November 30, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

I was glad I wasn't the only person worried this was a troll entry along the lines of the "clever people" who write "gender: attack helicopter" in their twitter profiles (thanks to PopeHat for this specific examples) and I'm also glad it's clearly not. I suppose to a certain extent, categorizing gender is tricky. It shouldn't be black and white. Yet making an involved taxonomy for its own sake is just exhausting all at once. Yet at the same time, people who criticize it the loudest have no problem discussing the difference between Alpha, Beta, Omega and Sigma males.

Abstractly, the game tracks your gender. It starts with boy or girl. Then it asks eagle or fish. Then a pebble or sun. Then a bit of a false choice before the final one, with an explanation. This all feels pretty simple. There's no overboard mysticism, and I appreciate MGiaF giving me a new way to think instead of telling me to.

I also think MGiaF shows a certain evolution from some of the more confrontational earlier twines that just flat out tell you you're not considering gender hard enough, you privileged cis white male, you. I mean, this is just heckling as opposed to outright abuse by cis white males, but if we're trying to make art, let's make it accessible even to those who might not be our target audience. And I appreciate feeling included, as someone who's heard I didn't try to be masculine enough, or why the hell was I trying to be macho, I wasn't fooling anyone.

I wanted a new way to look at things. MGiaF provided that. It's not the only way, but it helps reaffirm wishes I had long ago. Wishes that people who classified me as Not Masculine Enough (but don't try being as masculine as us!) would just clam up, or that there was indeed a third way, and there was far more to seeing yourself than being ranked by masculinity or desirability.

And it also provides a good contrast to the usual dialogue we hear in general. One particularly bad passage from a Reality TV show sticks in my head. I was only watching it because it was on the screens at my local athletic club. A bunch of guys were competing for one woman (the very worst kind of Reality TV, because shocker of shocker, relationships built on competition and the excitement of the chase don't last,) and the narrator asked "can the sensitive guys do man's man things like get a high score at the rifle shooting range?" Maybe this wasn't exact, but it was bad enough and obviously a very shallow exploration of our roles and who we are. We obviously can do better, and that MGiaF did so much better in under 15 minutes pleases me greatly. I can't speak precisely to how good the symbolism is, but it seems to me that we respect (or find wonderfully mystifying) the concept of spirit animals or objects or even corny tattoos in languages we can't speak, and it shouldn't be something to make people ooh and ahh, but something we can internalize and share as we wish. And MGiaF having nothing too exotic helped it feel accessible to me.

So I walked away wishing there was more but not feeling there had to be, despite my earlier-mentioned aversion to taxonomy. The old saw about how there are 2 times to walk away, too early and too late, apply here, and MGiaF walked away well before drowning you in pointless possibilities. I've certainly had that feeling of "I think I'm X, wait, no, that doesn't fit, more like Y" and so forth, and realizing that no labels fit, but reasonable ones helped me find who I was. And I appreciate having that experience sped up with little to no risk.

I can't offer any detailed literary analysis. This is out of my realm in many ways. There's a nonzero (but low) chance MGiaF is just random mysticism or parts are way off-base and I glossed over them and it successfully BSed me. But in that very unlikely case, I got a lot out of it. It left me writing and remembering a good chunk for something that took 15 minutes to get through. And I have a feeling I missed something, too, but these are blanks I'll fill in later.

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Smart Theory, by AKheon

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A brief work about cults where maybe I, myself, saw what I wanted to, November 30, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

Smart Theory is a great title, from my view. I guessed what the game was about, and I was right. It's very slippery. You see, if you're an advocate of Smart Theory, you get to show how smart you are, but you don't actually have to put it into practice. And if you're wrong, well, it's a theory and You Can Evolve. Of course, the antagonist in this game, Paul Bother, who invented Smart Theory, doesn't state things so directly. He strongly invites you to his lecture on Smart Theory, and you have no way to wiggle out (smart of him to know all the angles, eh?) You find Smart Theory is simple and accessible and has also changed people's lives. Everything about it works, and if it doesn't work for you, well, you don't understand it well enough.

This seems very much like a cult but also of times people just needed to hear themselves talk and I was a convenient alibi. I wanted to tell them they were full of nonsense but just couldn't. Sometimes they rattled on for a half-hour, which was longer than I spent with Smart Theory, both when I tried to reject Paul Bother's "philosophy" completely and accept it.

Now this isn't the first game to railroad you and try to do so amusingly, but I think it's quite effective, and I'm glad it's only 15 minutes, because too much would be too heavy for me. The author probably knew this, too. Paul Bother, to me, is every sort of person who informs you how lucky you are they are sharing their opinion at, I mean with, you. When he gets up there to make that lecture, he gives you a lot of things to think about but, of course, no time to. It's impossible to leave. And of course you get the inevitable "How was it?" question at the end. There are no right answers. Fortunately, unlike Paul Bother, the game (via Paul) exhorts you to think about what he said, and then it actually leaves you to think about what he said.

ST certainly pulls the usual psychological tricks to keep someone roped into a conversation. It pulls a lot of psychological tricks on the protagonist that can hurt in real life. You have the sense no matter what you do, Paul Bother will show you why you just weren't being very smart. Around Paul, you need to kiss up, but you also need to expect to be ignored. More advanced Smart Theorists will understand. At some points the game lampshades Paul's "rules for thee but not for me" approach. He is more advanced than you, you see, and his secrets are worth $10000 because, well, they just are. Paul's a philanthropist with stuff everyone should know, but only the people willing to make a commitment deserve to know the good stuff. He knows how to shift from soft repression to hard repression of actual ideas. And sadly, learning these tricks from someone like Paul would, indeed, be worth $10000 or more to some people.

All these thoughts are serious, but ST never got too serious. I see a lot of self-important humbugs from my past in Paul. Some had good concrete information and some didn't. But in either case, their personalities overshadowed any good advice. All needed to be looked up to, or fawned on in different ways, but nothing too obvious. They gave me a sort of ceiling I felt I couldn't break through, and if I wasn't able to overwhelm them with praise, I did look back feeling guilty I didn't praise them enough.

So I was quite happy to see this sort of polemicism dealt with. It didn't need anything deep. I've long had an axe to grind with "if you believe it, you can achieve it" motivational speakers (note: there's a place for developing your intuition and faith, but it's not with the Paul Bothers of the world). And people who need to tell you how smart they are (or common-sensical, because all YOUR book knowledge, well,i it's not practical.) It certainly brought back memories of very awful conversations with very overbearing and self-assured people, both smarter than me or not. Ones where no matter how much I contributed, I was sure I was doing it wrong, even if someone said "chime in if you want to."

So I think Smart Theory captures the basics of Internet arguing and grandstanding quite well. I know I spent years wondering why I didn't fully agree with people who I should agree with. This seems teleological, but over the years, I've realized there are attention-grabbing tricks and methods, or even just flat out assuming people would rather hear you than listen to your own thoughts. Confidence and taking constant steps towards your goals ... works. We need to develop that, despite our fears. And we need to trap ourselves into taking action, too. We need people to push us with Morton's-Fork style arguments. But doing it the wrong way can make you into a Paul Bother type. Some people actually want that. And, of course, bad people can use all these skills to seem like they have something to offer.

So I'm glad I was exposed to Smart Theory in a context that showed it was nonsense. Perhaps sometimes it's occasionally too on-the-nose, that's okay. What was on the nose for me was probably an insight for others, and vice versa.

And yet in a way, maybe ST fooled me. I suppose it told me what I already knew, and I agreed with it, and I was intrigued to learn more. Or I saw what I wanted to, for better or for worse. Which left me worried how weighty the game actually was. But one thing's for sure: I enjoyed seeing Paul Button flipping from "just listen" to "you said you'd give me a chance but you didn't REALLY" all too quickly.

Other people saw something different. Perhaps we all see what we want, or what we expect, in ST's generalities. After further reflection, I'm inclined to believe it was meant to be ambiguous. And I think clearly it's not the sort of thing you say "ALL THE FEELS" or "SO MUCH YES" to. But if you're in the right mood, it will help you deal positively with the next person who "just wants a bit of your time" about "something you need to know." Maybe it will pinpoint something from your past to bury. For a fifteen-minute investment, that's worth it.

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The Miller's Garden, by Damon L. Wakes

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Quick, efficient motivation and reflection without philosophical cliches, November 30, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

The author has labeled TMG as "experimental," and on my first play-through, that seemed like a cover for "heck, I'll throw something together and claim it's experimental." Oh, sure, the graphics of gardens depicted as rhomboid tiles was cute. It's neat that people offer that sort of thing on itch.io for free, and I think the visuals worked well with the game. But that was it, right?

Because the gameplay seemed awfully repetitive. Not annoyingly, tediously repetitive, but hey, once you get it, it's not too hard to keep going. You've been left some land to tend to, and the lawn and flowers and watermeadow by the river keep eroding, so they need to be tended to more. There's a pamphlet discussing the flooding, which seems like a red herring, but it's not, because the mill you've built is the reason the river is redirected and ruining your nice garden and such--also, the dry text says-without-saying that this sort of thing destroys beauty. It's not hard to figure how to be able to tend to everything you need to for each day of internal time. You then fall asleep, tired from your exertions, before you wake up and have to do it again. So after a bit, I said, okay, I get it, and I, in solidarity with the main character, fell asleep. Then I woke up and poked around to see if there was more. There was. A game-day later, I went through the motions and was asked "Is this how you wish to spend the rest of your days?"

The irony is that I probably wasted more time with more "interesting" stuff before I came back to TMG to see the whole point of it. Even then, I sort of missed the point until I thought about it again.

So the experiment worked. What seemed like a nice, harmless, tidily-packaged fifteen-minute game left a question stuck with me. Sure, I'd asked it before. I'd had others ask it of me, in that “your time isn't valuable but you're morally obliged not to waste it” sort of way. I'd felt bad not feeling fully inspired by people yelling "GET OUT THERE AND DO WHAT YOU REALLY WANT TO DO." It reminded me of how I'd spent some days, not even building anything back up, and I'd have done well to ask myself that question before sitting around for three or more hours, doing something that took energy but not getting anywhere. Perhaps it was at a website that long outlived its usefulness or benefit. Or maybe it was playing a game I'd mastered and found nothing new at.

But by this time I'd forgotten that it was the mill's fault that you had to do this extra work to keep your nice garden up. And so the "is this how you wish to spend the rest of your days?" question becomes more serious. Work and profit have gotten in the way so much that you've forgotten Nice Things, or rather, upkeep of the Nice Things gets so boring, you've forgotten what was there. And that happens whether you own a mill or not. Coworkers distract you from time to yourself. You need to learn new skills. You need to meet and keep in touch with the right people, people who are far less likely to have a garden than you. It brings to mind the opposite of the ending of Voltaire's Candide where the main character says "bien sur, il faut tenir notre jardin." And it takes even less time to (re-)read than Candide.

All this is more motivating to me than being yelled at to either get out there and live or do what you have to do. It reminds me of days I want to tidy up works I've written, or how I want to exercise every day or look through my old writing notes, where there probably won't be anything awesome in any 10-minute stretch, but when there is, it's really awesome. We all need these wake-up calls, and I'm not the sort who likes loud, rousing ones. They exhaust me. I suppose TMG worked on a superficial level and then a deeper level, and it will stop working one day, and I'll have to ask myself "is this how you wish to spend the rest of your time you use to get motivated?" But in any case, TMG really helped me get through all the other entries in IFComp, and I'm glad I did.

Because "Is this how you wish to spend the rest of your days?" is a question we need to ask ourselves, and we know it, but we also need the right context so we don't blow it off, or so we find a better way to spend the rest of our days. And of course we need to ask it before making drastic decisions like building a mill. I'm glad TMG asked this of me, and hopefully the next time I spend more than 15 minutes somewhere out of inertia, I'll know to ask this question without going through a few loops.

I feel like I'm raving about how it's the sort of game you don't rave about. But I think we need that sort of thing. TMG is an oddity for an IFComp entry despite not saying "LOOK AT ME I'M ODD." Its economical design certainly made me think back to my plans for 2021's IFComp--with 100 entries in 2020, I really wanted to make something that people could enjoy briefly, feel good about solving or working through, and move on to the next one, while still offering challenging things to think about. And I certainly hoped to see other games that did this for me. It may seem like backhanded praise to "attaboy, sport" TMG as a "glue guy" sort of game or a "good team player," but I certainly saw it that way, as something small that punched well above its weight and gave perhaps the best insight-per-time-spent ratio of any entry. And if IFComp continues to have 70 entries, well, I think we need efforts like this that help us breathe and still reveal a few things. Some will find it over-general, and I can't blame them, but I'm glad I didn't.

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A Papal Summons, or The Church Cat, by Bitter Karella

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Garfield, this ain't, November 30, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

For such a potentially sweet-sounding title, this sure gets rough fast. It's the story of a pilgrimage gone wrong or, more likely, that could never go right. You've taken leave from a faraway diocese in northern Scandinavia (or so I guess from the name Isjfall) for three months to visit His Holiness. And nothing about the trek is holy.

It starts with your companion on the ride to the Vatican. I'm struck with how his lack of dignity is an instant turn-off, while the cruel people in charge that you meet later are less immediately disgusting. You have plenty of chances to ignore the True Believer, as the game calls him, but you'll probably eventually give in to curiosity. He's carrying a casket, and it's never clear what's in there. You have ... a cat who can spout Bible verses. And the cat spouts the goriest ones! The Pope seems to want to see your cat, not you, but hey. You take what you can get.

Just one problem with your cat: there's a Papal edict that cats are all tied to witches. So they are being shoved into burlap sacks and burnt all over Rome. You get to see the results of this destruction: lots of smoke and lots of rats. Parallels with modern, uh, issues are pretty clear here: some politicians currently blame everything but the virus for COVID, and "religious exemptions/beliefs" are listed as a reason/excuse not to get vaccinated.

Of course it gets worse. The Pope is below ground, and in a pretty clear parallel to Dante's Inferno, you keep descending and keep finding worse and more powerful people. Until you make it. Your True Believer friend makes it, too. And the meeting with the Pope is certainly underwhelming. For you and the True Believer, but for different reasons.

This is deliberate, I think, because it calls into question if the Pope has any real power at all, and the unsavory people you've met along the way are doing the real heavy lifting, and they have as much contempt for the Pope as for any deity. The end feels like a bit like a cop-out, but not quite on the "it was all a dream" scale, but it does bring questions. It's been six months since the Pope sent the letter. Did the Pope forget about you? Did he ever care? Did he just like feeling important, having people spend so much time coming to visit? One also gets the feeling that the people who wave you by when you show the summons know you are no threat to what they see as real power. They don't exactly help you find whom you need to when you're exploring 10 or 15 or 20 levels below the surface. Because part of having power over people is making or letting them struggle when they don't need to, and that's true regardless of if there's any actual debauchery or bribery going on.

There was almost too much for me. Because we ought to have scorn for those who corrupt religion and morality and so forth. We need reminders that those who yell the loudest often yell to distract you from their bad sides. And we need to 1) not be the True Believer and 2) reject True Believers' arguments. But this work left little else. It was effective, and it's still relevant today. We see popular mass-preachers coming up with new lies, from Joel Osteen's fake sunniness to Franklin Graham's more wrathful approach. They blame rock music, nonconformists, or whatever is convenient, somehow convincing people they weren't in it for wealth and power, but gosh, good things happen to good people!

I don't think Church Cat is trying to look for a way forward, either. It shouldn't have to, but if you're reading reviews before playing, you may want to know this. I prefer a way forward, however small, and sometimes I fool myself it's there when it isn't. Church Cat left me no such outlet. So I'm left stuck a bit, but I probably would be, either way. Seeing ruthlessness in describing horrible people helps, until it doesn't. But on the other hand, putting in a sliver of hope after some of the passages would feel as hypocritical as a preacher switching from "God is love" to describing how and whom you, who are not God, should hate. Church Cat definitely crosses lines, not necessarily lines of taste, but beyond which any further observation or choice leds to more horror and chaos.

This didn't stop me from playing again to see if there was anything I'd missed, for better or worse.

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Beneath Fenwick, by Pete Gardner

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Parser-feeling Twine horror with innovative features, November 30, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

I have a low tolerance for horror. I see enough bad things going on in life, and realizing they are not confined gives me enough horror. I played Beneath Fenwick in the middle of a bunch of other horror games I'd procrastinated. I'd like to think I saw good in all of them, but some of them drained me a bit. BF, on the other hand, BF was a pick-me-up. It's in twine but tries for a parser-like feel, and I think it succeeds overall. My biggest complaint was the sudden ending--I wasn't the only person unclear that it was just part one! Perhaps part two would explain some other things, such as rabid dogs that chased you. Nevertheless, there's more than enough to attack in the game.

There's nothing overly complex in the plot. You're a graduate student looking for housing at a rural college. It's all a bit Lovecraftian, but not cringingly so. You run into the locals, who are either vaguely scared of something or actively hiding their fear. Your lodgings feel delightful until you stumble on things that don't quite seem right. You seem to need to tiptoe around the landlady and the gardener, as both notify you of Places You Shouldn't Go, and the bigger puzzles in BF are about gaining access. One place is, of course, very very dark. You'll need light.

Through this, there's clear evidence the author knows what he's doing. I really like the conversation system and how I was able to use the tab and enter key to lawnmower through the options. That's tricky in the parser, where you have to write the right words. But here, there's a popup box for dialogues as well as description, and I think that works better than a page with a "return to what you were doing" link. For me it helped the experience feel uninterrupted. There was even an undo arrow that I missed until I needed it, because I got chased into a dead end by a rabid dog. (This was my fault. The game had two ways to shake them off.

And a few neat touches made me smile in the middle of all the horror, and atmosphere, and so forth. The first was getting booted from one location for asking too many questions. I appreciated the extra focus of having one less place to look at in the future, and how the game still ratcheted up the tension in the process, and it balanced nicely with later parts when the game preventing you from visiting certain areas until you knew where you were going. The second was actually having to use the "drop" command for a small puzzle. The third was having to cover your tracks, as in Sub Rosa, but with bumpers: as opposed to losing final points for leaving evidence, you were forced to do so by the game. I wound up feeling "gee, I'm lucky I didn't get killed, there."

On the downside, I do feel like more could maybe have been done with the "combine" command. It's got a neat interface and is mostly used for an early puzzle to fetch a package without being noticed and largely discarded after that. This feels better than the alternative (overusing it so we have to guess a lot) but in this case, it was pretty clear what to do, though maybe some clues about combos that almost work would've been nice. I may have missed them. But it's some neat under-the-hood stuff that deserved more mileage. There's also a dog chase that feels technically neat but doesn't have the emotion it should. It's a rare part of BF that might've worked better in a parser.

I can't give any advice here to do things better, but I think having shortcomings like this means it's a pretty darn good experience. The author commented in the forums that a sequel was forthcoming, because they wanted to narrow the scope to have something fully playable. Still, BF leaves you with more than enough. I'm definitely waiting for the second part.

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I Contain Multitudes, by Wonaglot

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Wherein mask wearing leaves you vulnerable to (redacted), November 30, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

ICM was a bit intimidating for me to start, and not just because of the title. The introduction didn't say so, but I pictured being told "You'd better contain some seriously meaningful multitudes if you want to keep up with this game, kid." And I don't think wasting time on several very different websites every day counts a lot. The first moves, too, promise challenge and variety. There seems like a lot to do early on. You're Chandra Fitz, a junior engineer on a ship, and you're tasked with finding who murdered the Bishop of Elmee, one of the passengers. On the first move, you see a bunch of masks you can wear, and once you leave, there are all sorts of exits. So certainly I got the impression that this game will be very, very big. That, coupled with the captain saying "you have an hour to do things," left me worried I'd have to do a lot of mental calculus, and fast. I steeled myself for an initial mapping run before actually getting things done.

The reality wasn't so weighty. There was certainly more than enough, with interesting characters of noble birth, as well as the gruff captain and helpful ship's mate. Masks are only used for a few puzzles, though when they are, it's quite satisfying. They help give the fetch quests a bit of weight. This is reductionist, because the fetch quests do have a bit of dialogue and push the story forward, and the noblemen and women (and a chanteuse and a slightly mad doctor) who push you around, replete with appropriate highfalutin names and highfalutin dialogue, just can't be bothered to do things themselves. Too many, and the game might start to wear. But there are enough. If you please them, they may give you a key to their suite. And as you help them, you learn more about them. And the ship. It's not powered by the usual sources.

The nobles' needs certainly seem trivial. And each is a bit odd in their own way, and yet, they know something is wrong. Someone has film to be developed that they lost. Another person needs medicine or something resembling it. Another person wants you to sing with them. If you behave well enough, they may invite you to their room in the passenger's quarters, briefly. However, fetch quests aren't really the way to bring out the multitudes in you. And sometimes there's a bit of a fight to search promising locations that look likely to hide something. For instance, I had to SEARCH CABINET instead of X CABINET. Here's where the usually helpful Quest interface backfired. It will generally highlight things that are clearly important, but halfway through the game I got a bit lazy and relied on highlights to tell me what to do. Between that and a parser slightly less sophisticated than Inform's, I got slowed down a bit. These faults are likely not in the author's bucket.

The boat isn't a very huge place. Once you've pleased all the nobles, you find out there's something sinister happening in the engine, to which you have a one-way passage. I admit to poking through the source post-comp and having several a-ha moments. It's not quite spiritual possession--but the boat doesn't exactly run on high-octane gasoline or anything scientific. You do just need to be prepared. Here a choice of mask matters. There's a bit of retcon for certain masks. For instance, for one mask, you realize (Spoiler - click to show)you were the one that committed the murder. This conflicts with someone completely different planning the murder if you take the straight-up no-mask ending, where you get something about generally learning to be your own person, etc. That's all well and good, but it's a bit plain compared to the others. Stuff can get macabre. Perhaps the most interesting thing is the "where are they now" at the ending: choices you made during a dialogue can, for instance, cause a lovesick nobleman to enter or avoid a duel depending on how flowery a love note you ghost-write for him is.

ICM may have buried all this, and I don't think it gave an adequate technical carrot-on-a-stick to go look back--perhaps even a "you should try" option at the end. Though it does signpost that you should save before you visit the engine. So if you're reading this, save before you reach the engine, and take all the masks. It should be rewarding.

But given that, the concept of a ship powered by what it was powered by, and the end revelations (yes, the captain has a reason not to hire an actual detective,) makes for a good sort of creepy story that feels like time well spent. Certainly the final moves add a good deal of tension and some explanation. The biographies at the end add a lot of closure and explanation and, yes, a carrot-on-a-stick to say "what if I'd X instead?" I just felt I had a lot of adjusting to do after first impressions, and it wasn't until I replayed and looked at the source code that I realized who in the story got to say "I Contain Multitudes." It's only shown in one ending, perhaps the trickiest to get to, and one only hinted in the walkthrough that comes with the game. I don't blame the author for giving you the "plain good" ending in the walkthrough, though--discovering new endings, even cheating by looking at the source code, gave me a deeper appreciation of what ICM was doing.

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Enveloping Darkness, by John Muhlhauser, Helen Pluta, and Othniel Aryee

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Logical but unemotinal narrative of rescuing your brother, November 30, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

This is a short choice-based game with a relatively linear structure--you can try radically different things, but most of the time, they loop back to the main narrative. It opens up a lot of possibilities it never really acts on, and by the end, I'm not sure why it took the title it did. Yes, there's a war going on, but I never really encountered a darkness or overarching evil. That said, there's enough to do that I played through it twice to flesh the world out a bit more.

Enveloping Darkness takes you quickly through your younger brother getting captured by orcs. Then you grow up and ask to go on a quest to rescue your brother. You usually will. I only found one possibility that kills you. Trying to avoid your fate doesn't work. You can insult your king or neglect your half-orc ally who wants to help you get to the palace. You can even act sore at your brother. The choices are all plausible for an adventure-seeking adolescent.

The mechanics of the storytelling are good. It's well-organized. But there's not much to be emotionally invested in, which is a pity, because having a half-orc ally in enemy territory presents so many possibilities. The game makes good use of a few rather quickly, but it felt emotionally wanting. Sometimes the game seemed to steer deliberately away from any emotional revelations or depths. For instance, when you rescue your brother:

(Spoiler - click to show)First things first. You ask, "Where's dad?"

Shazia says, "Hello to you too.


This is a bit cold, especially from someone who begged to go on the quest in the first place! I've had this unintentional misdirection where I walked away from a story mid-idea and come back, where I've worked out the technical bits and forgotten about the emotional or readability side. The authors have kept track of things abstractly--there are some running tabs on how willing you were to let Troy, the half-orc, join you. But none of this is put into the narrative as you'd expect, when two very different teenagers have to rely on each other for survival as they flee Something Bad. It doesn't have to be heart-wringing. But here it buries the lede or jumps off a track for a bit. The story opens up possibilities--for instance, ditching Troy or expressing displeasure with him--but it's all tamped down too quickly, and all this avoidance of overwrought prose turns out to take away from the story's full believability in its own way.

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The Waiting Room, by Billy Krolick

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Effective nursing home/geriatric wing horror, November 30, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

In TWR, you're a new hire at a nursing home, and the patients seem to be dying more painfully than you'd expect. There are unexplained incidents and mentions of shadow people, but your coworkers don't believe it. Until they sort of do, if you push them to investigate things they've grown acclimated to.

On your first day you meet a fellow nurse named Austin who tells you not to bother with Ethel, who is always complaining. Whether or not you do, and whether you determine her complaints to be real, is one of the meaningful decisions in the story. There are other things to do to verify Ethel's complaints, which seem like generic "old folks whining" stuff, but of course, TWR wouldn't be very exciting if that were it.

The next meaningful choice is when you are sent on a night shift with a nurse named Maria and have to face a Shadow Person. Maria sort of believes in ghosts and sort of doesn't, and after a few sequences that turn out to be dreams, you're faced with the fact that, yes, the Shadow People exist. Who they are and what they want is revealed if you know where to look in the dark wing of the hospital you've been relegated to. The mystery isn't a particularly tricky one, intellectually, but there's always an obstacle once you think you've done the right thing. Though I wasn't surprised, things fit pretty tidily with the introduction, and I realized I cared about the other patients in Ethel's wing as well.

I got the good ending the first time through, basically by paying attention and not being be a jerk. The story grabbed me enough, I felt like trying for the not-so-good one, though it was hard making some choices knowing what would likely happen immediately. I even worried whom my bad acts might take down. Both main endings turned out quite satisfying, and while writing this review I thought a bit about the dead nurse you find and what sort of person they must have been. My guess is, they'd have to be meaner than Austin. It was disquieting.

Perhaps hard-core horror aficionados might find it TWR too facile, but I was engaged, and the depiction mentioned in the content warnings weren't overwhelming to me. My brain said it'd be easy to blow off anything supernatural in a nursing home because conditions there are bad anyway, but TWR had enough emotional pull to overcome that.

I hate backhanded compliments, so I hope this is sincere: it's workmanlike, and it works, and quite bluntly sometimes I'd rather not have a story try to blow me away. This is a work by someone who knows what they're doing and how to tell a story without trying too little or much, but they didn't seem to shoot for the stars this time. It feels polished enough, but not shiny, and that's better than the reverse. I'd be happy with another work like this in IFComp 2022, but I also sense the writer can do more.

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Infinite Adventure, by B.J. Best (writing as “A. Scotts”)

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Extends <game redacted> nicely, if not infinitely, November 29, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

If you played another game first in IFComp 2021, this game may've set alarm bells ringing. (Spoiler - click to show)Because it is the game featured in BJ Best's And Then You Come..., the one Emerson and Riley play and alternatively sort of like and sort of find stupid. It's a part of their past. I apologize for the spoilers here--working out why IA is as it is was fun, more fun than playing IA, and it was pretty clearly planned that way. So I recommend playing "that game" first.

And on its own, IA's got a bit of simple charm that wears out quickly. It wouldn't deserve to do well, entered on its own. That's intentional, and unlike more overt "haha, this quick game I wrote is kinda lame" efforts, it works. Especially since I think it would generally have been impressive in the 80s, and I could've pictured myself playing it 50 times in a row just to feel better I couldn't get that one Infocom puzzle. So it evokes a bit of nostalgia there, for all the cheap games I played when I was frustrated by the hard games. "Hey, look! I'm solving something different every time!" I'd get back to that tougher game eventually. But I'd usually get tired first. So it waited until the next day.

Well, yes and no. You're dumped in a procedurally generated house of 5 to 12 rooms It's not really even a maze, just rooms connected horizontally and vertically wherever possible. Somewhere, maybe right next to you, there's an NPC or a box or an idol. Whichever it is, it requests a certain type of item, whether verbally or in writing. You then GIVE them the right item. It's pretty hard to bungle what to do. They ask for an umbrella, you search for one. The box requires something fancy, and it's probably not the VHS tape. You might have to go through all the rooms for a new item to turn up, but it'll be there. Since the rooms are procedurally generated, the fetch-quests, while clear, often have minimal sense or existential purpose. A zombie wants an eggplant. An orc wants a raincoat. You start seeing the same items. The game keeps track of wins (do what you're told) and losses (your quest giver overreacts and blows up the whole house.) Also, the text automaps for each area are legitimately neat--you can see the whole house even if you just arrived. It's the sort of thing that made me think "no way someone could do this" back then (Beyond Zork's randomized areas blew my mind for a bit,) but now I can see it's not too bad to plan out if you sit down and figure it out. Of course, they're there at the expense of things that seem more generally convenient now. Commands like GIVE IT after TAKE VIOLET don't work. You must type the whole thing out.

This is all pretty clearly the real author having the purported author, Adam Scotts (no biological relation to Scott Adams, I assume,) make a "nice big long" adventure. Especially since the garage sale where the disk was found is in (Spoiler - click to show)Appleton, Wisconsin, the location of the game above.

Except ... except ... there's more to the game. ABOUT ABOUT gives different text, which along with ABOUT suggests there are other commands. And, most importantly, one command reveals poor Mr. Scotts's production values and testing (either by himself, or by his friends) as utterly lacking. It's a command that really shouldn't fail, though the game is "winnable" without it. On seeing the unusual response to this command, I got to byte hacking, and the things I tried were much more obscure than they needed to be. I missed something relatively obvious.

I still feel The Ascot is a gold standard for "oh my goodness you do THAT" moments from an abstract point of view, and I utterly will not spoil it, and I'm not sorry if you go play the Ascot and fail to figure it out at first, because getting it right feels great. However, what to "really" do in Infinite Adventure had more emotional payoff than The Ascot or the (also quite nice) four-person meta-puzzle in the 2010 IFComp. It's cool to be able to do certain things you couldn't do in real life.

Other reviews may spoil things more explicitly than this one. I'd just like to say that the levels don't change, but in a reasonable amount of time, you get some some neat fourth-wall breaking stuff. How long do you need to play? I won't tell. I gave up at adventure 12 my first time through. But let's just say you don't need an exorbitant wait, and a perfect game isn't really the point. You can make more than one mistake. Oh, and if you really want to see what's up, the hex file editor you may've used to open the save file? Use it on the EXE. There are certain strings you can search for. Doing so made me feel like a hacker, the hacker I always wanted to be when I was a minor, even though robust hex editors remove many of the mental calculating challenges real hackers from the 80s had to face.

Also one odd thing that may be personal remembrance: I had to download DosBox to my (relatively) new computer to play this. My old one had it, but I hadn't use it. It brought back nostalgia for the first time I loaded DosBox. What was the nostalgia for? For the nostalgia I experienced of games I remembered or never quite got to play, or maybe I got to play slightly improved versions of old Apple games, or sequels to old Apple games that were too big for the Apple IIe. (Magic Candle II, for instance.) It reminded me of times I, as a kid, played a game I knew I could beat, so I could put off stuff I really needed to get better at. I knew I should be challenging myself a bit more, but winning at an easy game made me feel smart. Then, as an adult, I replayed some games--including some I never beat, but this time with cheat codes I'd snagged from the web. It provided closure, even just knowing that a certain "3 lives and you're dead" game looped. But playing IA and its connected game felt more satisfying than those actual games. In fact, so did looking at the source code the real author so kindly shared. As a kid, I got stuck with BASIC and had a disappointing experience with programming courses for compiled courses. So, more closure. Yay.

This may not apply to you, but I was at just the right age and had just the right life experience for this all to work. I like nostalgia that helps me move on, and IA provided a good deal of that for relatively little investment.

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Finding Light, by Abigail Jazwiec

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Well balanced rescue quest featuring a fox/human shapeshifter, November 29, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

The main feature of Finding Light is immediate and very appealing. You can change between a human and a fox with the help of a gem, and you need to switch between forms to rescue your master, Aurel, who has been captured by bandits. It's done quite well. FL rejects rejecting physically impossible stuff and balances fox tasks with human tasks quite well and even hints the player special verbs to do or type without force-feeding them.

The game starts with you (Ezra) waking up, lost, in a forest. And it's pretty clear you need to become a fox to escape, but the problem with foxes is: they're color-blind. So this creates problems later. However, you, as a fox, can also talk to animals. You'll need to, to get into the bandits' fortress. The puzzling here is pretty clear but not trivial. There are two horses to talk to. One wants something before really helping you. Along the way, you need to change back to human form to handle a certain item. But one thing I really enjoyed was the game letting you open the gate as a fox-–putting the key in your mouth and finally getting it right. That is attention to worthwhile detail.

Then inside the fortress you find other obstacles. Ezra can't read and needs an ally who can. Ezra meets a rat who wants shiny objects and whose brother is missing. Eventually Ezra finds a secret passage that lets him infiltrate the inside of the fortress, but there's a maze, and I think it's well-done, especially when you go off-course. It tells you you've missed information without saying "go back and look for more," and while many of us (rightfully) hate mazes, I really enjoy seeing one more way the whole "big maze" trope is successfully subverted. This mechanic was, in fact, used independently in two other entries in the Comp. So maybe in 2022, it will be stale. But for now, it's something good, and each of the three games treated going off-course in the maze substantially differently. Here, the first time you go off-course, an animal will help you back to the start, if you found an optional item. FL is the strictest about getting the path through the maze right, though, as you'd expect. And it pretty clearly signposts things.

Crossing the maze seems to trap you in a final fight with no way back, and it's possible you might be locked out of the best ending. There's one item with a clear purpose that isn't used to get deeper into the fortress, but it plays an important role. FL is replayable and memorable enough to patch this up. And so you can hit all the endings. Some were sad, of course (you can sit and do nothing during a big fight,) but they felt emotionally right.

One thing I didn't try was changing forms around animals. I definitely have my testing side while I play through comp games, but I certainly felt "hey, my friends might react unfavorably," which speaks very well for the immersion factor. As do some choices you make (mostly interacting with other animals) that don't affect whether you can get through with the game: they're there, and they're real, and I didn't care if they were practical. They were worth thinking about.

I'm not surprised that a first-time effort like this would do well. Its goal is clear, the mechanics are intuitive and relevant, and the puzzles are smart without forcing you to pull your hair out. My major worry throughout this game was that the human/fox switching would be thrown to the side, but that doesn't happen. Each form gets approximately equal screen time. I took a transcript as I went through, and when I found a nitpick to comment on, I felt like a bit of a bum noting it despite all the fun I had. On replaying, I still enjoyed it a lot. And I think you will too.

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Goat Game, by Kathryn Li

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Cheery illustrations with a replayable Your Lousy Job (sort of) game, November 29, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

Goat Game advertises itself as taking two hours, which I think is an overestimation. The first few times may seem tricky, but once you see the main branches, subsequent playthroughs go fast. You'll see the story and what roughly happens if you make certain choices. The main thing then may be to see how to get all the endings efficiently. There's some risk of repeating endings, even if you figure which choices fully matter. There are three stats on the bottom: work, opportunity, and social, and twiddling them correctly gives different endings. This sounds a bit dry, and it neglects the actual story and the neat illustrations which play well with the story. Though after a few times through, you may be more focused on which combination of choices makes a legitimately new ending. It's very logical but with a neat curveball.

You play as a goat researcher who will soon have the decision of signing a new lease or moving on with your life. While sticklers might say nothing in Goat Game relies on you being a goat, there are some nice touches like talking about horn enhancement and banging your horns under a desk when searching for something. Part of me wonders if more could've been made of your goatness, but maybe I'm being greedy here. It's creativity, and if it's for its own sake, it doesn't feel misplaced. It also helps soften some of the more serious themes.

Goat Game takes you through a workday or two and exposes you to the personal consequences of your action. It details your research at Yobel Labs, how you get there, how you interact with people. It asks how you like the job, or where you live. Later some co-workers offer to tell you about an ancient secret. The underground workhouses are a bit sobering even with the whimsical pictures. There are standard themes of worker exploitation. Soon after this tour (which you can decline,) something happens! An explosion. Tobias, the CEO of Yobel Labs, gives standard corporate-speak reassurances, and he's a bit of a jerk. Based on your earlier choices, you can confide with people you know. You're accosted by some protestors as you go to work, and then you have a chance to leave or stay. The protestor bit stuck with me because, no matter how you respond, they accuse you of Being With the Man. Not quite as awful as Tobias, but still annoying.

Each possible ending feels like it really branches out, which is creative on the one hand but a bit unpredictable and sometimes unrealistic on the other. They don't all fit together logically. Aaron, your colleague with a rebellious streak (he's the one who tries to get you to sign a petition after taking you belowground) swings from being very successful to nearly losing it. This seems incongruous on the face of it. You can't really affect someone else's life that much. But given the final ending, and the sort-of cutscenes (with some self-flagellation) after you achieve a certain number of different endings(Spoiler - click to show) (mostly dream-logic stuff or at least you worrying what could happen) it does make a bit more sense.

I saw the paths through as perhaps regretting what didn't happen or worrying what you'd turn into, and (Spoiler - click to show)the 15th ending only appears once you got through all 14 paths, a more universal message about people being different, etc. yet being able to work towards their goals as a consequence. You saw everything and were able to bring together people with different levels of dedication to their work or confidence they'd make a difference. The dream sequences seem to indicate there may be some woolgathering on the protagonist's part. There's always something wrong. Perhaps you feel lazy and layabout, or perhaps ditching Yobel for the startup made you a different kind of ruthless.

So this is definitely an interesting experiment. For having the endings branch out a bit too much, it's pretty tidy. However, I found that by the tenth or so playthrough, I was focused more on clicking through quickly (note: to save time and energy, choose the bottom options and work up, so the unfolding text doesn't push the options down.) And I also stumbled over something that confused me that, whether deliberate or not, provided an additional interesting wrinkle. I do think the number of endings was about right. An explanation of endings is below the spoiler--you may not wish to fight with things.

(Spoiler - click to show)Sometimes an action that seems like it should increase a stat doesn't. That's because the game gives a score of 0-3 for each stat, and 0 is low, 1-2 are mid, and 3 is high. So jumping from 1 to 2 gives nothing. But what the game really tracks is if you have any of each of the three stats (8 possibilities, discounting having zero in all three,) and then there is a yes or no question at the end.

Goat Game feels very well done, then, on balance. The final ending, while not super-profound, brought everything together well, so I'm glad I spent the couple extra minutes writing out what choices to make, when, to see everything. The small abstract exercise didn't dent my emotional enjoyment, and it shouldn't dent yours.

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The Corsham Witch Trial, by JC Blair

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Nothing supernatural but still thoughtfully unnerving, November 29, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

I was worried this was going to be about supernatural stuff, so I put it to the side. Too heavy for me, can't think about that, and so forth, even at a half-hour per playthrough. Might disturb me enough I have to think of other things before getting back to business. Well, there's no supernatural stuff (perhaps I saw the author's last name and Witch and thought Blair Witch, too,) but I needed to have a good think and clear my head after it. It was emotionally effective for me. But the "witch trial" is figurative.

You are a new investigator with a firm, and the boss has given you a case of his that got away. How you react to it will indicate whether you're a good long-term fit for the firm, though any discussions of that are outside the scope of this entry.

The case is one of alleged child abuse and whether an administrator showed criminal negligence in deeming it NFA (no further action.) Sarah Teller, a teacher, sees there's clearly something wrong with a student, Emma-Mai Morgan. The obvious signs are there (bruises and so forth) along with some creative writing that seems above Emma-Mai's level, and it's pretty dark stuff. It gets even darker: something serious happens, and Foster-Clyde, the case worker, is on trial for criminal negligence for ignoring her warnings.

Through the story, you click to open emails tangent to the case and exhibits offered in court. It's quickly obvious that, as the main characters say, Foster-Clyde is a bit of a prick (okay, maybe I'm biased against the name,) and Mr. Morgan, the father, is far worse. Andy Etteridge, the boss of the firm and prosecutor on the years-past case, sends emails to Sarah Teller to say, keep strong. Foster-Clyde seems to say the right things about not being too hasty and only so much that can be done legally, and yet he doesn't cc: Sarah Teller when explaining his NFA. He throws in a token "this may be important to you, but we're overwhelmed." He does tell Mr. Morgan to cool it, in person, but he doesn't do much more–like, for instance, noting Morgan's behavior is pretty classic DARVO (though that acronym might not have been so widely-known back whenever this trial occurred--we're not told.) And, of course, he has a very expensive, observant, biting lawyer who finds a flaw in Sarah Teller's personal history. It's saved for last. She's discredited before the jury but not in the court of popular opinion. I can't comment on whether this would be acceptable in court, in he UK or US, but putting myself in Sarah Teller's shoes and fearing a blindside like this can be crippling even if it doesn't happen.

This is tough for me. I've had times when things were far less critical than in the Morgan household and I heard "we can't do anything" or "there are more important things for you/society to worry about." Sometimes even with flowery words and a quick smile. Sometimes it was people who could've taken time to say something nice but didn't. But there was one time where, legitimately, someone said there was not enough actionable evidence. In this case, it was about an abusive schoolteacher ("but he made people laugh!") and four years later, that schoolteacher was pushed out the door. So it gives me some hope the form letters I receive are more than that, but it's also awful that the Foster-Clydes of the world hide behind them. One wonders why Foster-Clyde took the job he did, and one suspects there are many Foster-Clydes who just had the good fortune never to have a case they turned down blow up so spectacularly.

I also kind of froze for a while considering that the weakness the prosecutor found in Sarah Teller might be the reason why she saw something in Emma-Mai. Sarah Teller, too, knew unhappiness and family disappointment (her reaction to her father's death has a lot of anger, and it's unclear whether (Spoiler - click to show)her drinking was a suicide attempt) and despite being smart enough to be a teacher, acted in ways she didn't understand and hid certain things and wound up looking bad for it. Perhaps someone without that experience would've asked Emma-Mai "are you okay" and tried to help and that would be it, but what else can they do? They would not have pressed.

Perhaps you-the-character's opinion on the case is too much of a litmus test for whether you're right for the job, too, and that's meant to reflect on Andy Etteridge. I mean, yes, Morgan was a bad man, and Foster-Clyde slipped badly. I was a bit unnerved by how the boss wound up marrying the teacher who was subjected to cross-examination, so it wasn't just a case near to his heart. At the beginning, your coworker Cerys tells you "some people read it and decide it's not for them" and gives a general "oh yeah, THAT case" vibe. But it also feels weird and roundabout that you got the file on the anniversary of the court date and not, say, a few months after being hired. It suggests that Andy's frustration is more about him wanting good-fit employees who'll stay in line if he himself gets shouty than employees seeing if they are a good fit. Which, okay, you could Google him and find out his case, but something sat wrong with me.

It's minor compared to Morgan and Foster-Clyde, of course, but it's there. And it puts "Andy just wants to do right" in perspective. Sure, you want subordinates you're on the same page with. But this feels underhanded, and it's disappointing that a crusader against child abuse–especially one who got changes brought–would use his power in this way. And I can't quite shake it, and I suspect the author meant that. Certainly I've had experience seeing Political Crusaders being revealed as abusive jerks, usually ones who originally left me feeling I didn't have the passion they did, before their passion was shown as ... not for the best. Andy felt potentially that way to me.

This is a very tough piece to read for being so short. Certainly there are times I wanted to ask others if things were okay, or I wanted to be asked. But it's chilling to think that doing the right thing and asking may result in even worse, and the people who push for doing right are, in fact, motivated more by narcissism and not general altruism. Perhaps Sarah Teller even felt guilt for maybe escalating Morgan's anger.

All this also brings up the question: who is the witch? I assumed Mr. Morgan at first, as falsely accused, but of course, Sarah Teller gets her own witch-trial in the course of public opinion.

And one other thing that seems like a detail: the comp version skipped from exhibit H to J. There was plenty of interesting stuff to look through. But I'm still hoping to find exhibit I to maybe put one more piece in place. This speaks to how involved I was in the story even though it unsettled me.

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BLK MTN, by Laura Paul

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Surreal cross-country trip/commune experience, November 29, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

I confess I was uneasy about this one, since it not only featured an all caps title but also one without vowels. The second bit reminds me of how Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole character sent John Tydeman a novel with all the e's missing, by fax. Which resulted in a very, err, polite letter back. Thankfully the author is a little better at the whole creative writing thing than Adrian Mole. (So, for the record, is the author of D'ARKUN, also in this year's comp.) So any fears of "LOOK AT ME I'M CREATIVE" vibes are unfounded, though as the title clues, you may just have to be ready for something unusual to get everything you can from it. I found it quite challenging, emotionally (it's largely puzzle-free,) and it looks like there were different paths through. It's also quite possible a timed-text bug disrupted me from looking as deeply into the story as I'd hoped. Sometimes you have to reset. But I know this, on replay: there's stuff I missed the first time through, and I'm glad I cheated a bit to see everything that was there. Some branches I missed made sense.

The first part of the story is a cross-country road trip, starting in California, destination Asheville, North Carolina. I've heard all sorts of things about how beautiful Asheville is–it certainly seems like A Destination. The main character, Jackson, is headed there, though they don't quite know why. Everything is set up to be a bit surreal, and by the end, it was unclear to me how much the narrator was hallucinating or imagining. However, given that they went to Black Mountain, an experimental commune/university which only existed until 1957 and which really seemed doomed to fail despite/because of its noble/nonmaterialistic goals. There are some breaks in time -- Confederate soldiers are off to the side, and you also meet Timothy McVeigh if you are brave enough to explore after dark. Yet things switch back quickly--your hotel has Wifi, for instance. It's nontrivial to keep track of. There's also weird stuff if you turn on the radio to keep you company. Someone named R. E. Lee describes a rebellion against the nation that has to happen.

Without spoiling too much, you can meet R. E. Lee. Bluebird is also referenced in Black Mountain. But it is quite possible to miss them, and though BLK MTN has an undo function, reworking through is tough. Perhaps a "go to this chapter" page at the end--or maybe a password-protected index--is in order. I certainly put off posting this review of BLK MTN to IFDB, because I was worried I'd miss something gigantic, but once I poked at the source code, things fell into place.

There's also a fellow passenger, Ashleigh, you can pick up for an intentionally awkward but not creepy love scene. So with all that, things didn't really start for me until Black Mountain. Perhaps that's because I really enjoy reading about noble failures, and things that should've worked but didn't, and maybe of people who should've been more famous but weren't. And at Black Mountain, we get a feel of that. The first time through, in fact, I failed to see everything, because I was still taking in all the names and ideas thrown at me right away. In short, I chose the "be a wimp and don't express yourself" options, because I did not to be in a virtual Burning Man convention. (My fears were unwarranted.) The only name I recognized was Walter Gropius, and him only because of his cameo in Tom Lehrer's song Alma, which has some of Lehrer's very cleverest rhymes. That I'm thinking of Tom Lehrer after reading a piece like this tells you where my priorities lie, but I do have to share this rhyme with people who haven't heard it.

(Spoiler - click to show)
While married to Gus she met Gropius
And soon she was swinging with Walter
Gus died and her teardrops were copious
She cried all the way to the altar


You meet someone called Marisol, who (Spoiler - click to show)reminds you of Ashleigh, and who eventually sings Bluebird (I missed this, because I don't care for live music, especially not "spontaneous" Bohemian live music or general 60s counterculture-style be-ins) and your friend who called you to Black Mountain, Jim Clemens, while not a historical figure, is sort of in charge, and he informs you Black Mountain has lost their lease. So BLK MTN ends with some interesting reflections.

These were scattered throughout BLK MTN and were the most interesting parts to me. The local flavor along the way--well, it seems like it had to be there, and it made sense, and I'm glad I took the detours, but it never quite soared. The reflections on memory that I appreciated at the time will probably pop up in some form, and it also called into question how much we can and should remember of past events. The story deliberately keeps this unclear, and I also found on re-reading that I valued a lot of parts differently the second time through. Any actual specifications or concrete suggestions on what to remember, though, would seem to violate the spirit of BLK MTN, where so much is vague and ambiguous.

So I do think the title is appropriate: you immediately see "Oh, this is Black Mountain, with stuff missing." In fact, I figured Black Mountain was just some bit of scenery, and this may've dented my expectations--I was quite glad to find it was an actual collection of people, and BLK MTN didn't end with telling you the journey was the important thing and a moment of realization. It's more than that. You will find stuff missing along the way, and once you hit the Black Mountain, you will see other stuff is missing, or it shortly gets lost. You will be sure you missed something. This isn't always positive, but it works.

BLK MTN seems most closely related to You Are Spam-Zapper, with its attempt to make philosophy out of something entirely different and wild, but it doesn't seem as optimistic, and for whatever reason, that worked a bit better for me, even if I do appreciate more optimistic works. Perhaps it didn't introduce any new terminology, even if some sentences clanked slightly. I feel bad not giving more detailed references and quotes, because BLK MTN seems to deserve it. It certainly got across much more serious ideas, left me with more, got far less in my face than I expected.

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What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed, by Amanda Walker

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Surprisingly cathartic, with well organized custom verbs., November 29, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

WH2G2 may have the most innovation at the parser level as any game in the comp. It's simplified for most commands, but you have a string of verbs you acquire as you go along. They're emotional verbs, leading you to a journey of finding yourself and recreating how things happen. What has happened is pretty clear, without the title. You're a ghost, and you're not used to being a ghost, so it stands to reason you died recently. Not only are you a ghost, but you can't pass through walls. This, in fact, Means Something in the greater context of things and is more than just a way to keep the game small and manageable. As you move around, you see your old house in ways you never did before, leading up to several Big Reveals. And while it's billed as Gothic horror, these reveals were more than enough for me to face certain incidents from my past in a way a self-help book, even a good one, never could. It worked at least as well as some self-help book satires, too. So I found it very powerful. And yes, there were violent and disturbing scenes, but they weren't there for their own sake, and they were contrasted with more mundane revelations which were crushing in their own sort of way.

To start, all you can do is examine stuff, and there's not much to examine, but then you wind up with your first verb, learning to excite. This helps you leave the initial attic room, and later on, you wind up learning new emotions. Some of these seem harmless, but they become darker as you see things in new ways. Technically, you're snooping, and it feels quite nosy, but on the other hand, you didn't ask to be a ghost. Also, as backstory is filled in, you find you've been trapped in your own home. Your family is ashamed of you. Your grandfather, who is on his deathbed, treated you badly.

But the real reveal is this: your sister, Eva, and your step-brother, Ian, have done worse. The game narrates Eva as "being mean some of the time," eventually saying you're the reason she doesn't get out as much as she wants. Ian, on the other hand, has been complimentary of your artistic skill. (Your paintings are shown several places in the house. Sometimes you're even allowed to walk around and see it!) He recognizes you are a better artist than he is, though he enjoys woodcarving. You recognize Ian and Eva are lovers, but you appreciate Ian's kindness. But then you discover notes written between Eva and Ian, discussing you. Ian seems almost moderate and apologetic. Eva is not. The more emotions you reclaim and places you explore, the harder it is to stop being upset. You visit your grandfather on his deathbed, and there are some strong moments of trying various emotions on him. He has some realizations at the end, harsh ones for him, but it could have been worse. For someone else, it will be. Even in death, though, you feel blocked off from the living people chatting. They leave once you solve more puzzles, which sounds clunky on my part, but the game weaves this together seamlessly. The more emotion you learn, the more time passes, and people leave your house.

There are several climactic moments in the game. A good one was when you lost the ability to desire, once you notice proof that Ian was in on your imprisonment. It's not just emotional but practical. You could get overloaded with too many possible actions to perform, and while you could work them out, it would be thorny. Another is the implicit realization of how hard it is for you to get to your bedroom. It's the last of seven doors that you'll open, and even though it's a prison, it's where you could be you, and you realize how much worse it would've been if you hadn't had your art. Then you realize for Eva, that twist of the knife was not a bug but a feature. There's also facing the housekeeper, who herself deserves closure, as well as what's in the chest at the beginning, and finally Eva and Ian. The end is not pretty, and it makes sense and feels just. Once you get to the end, you'll realize (seriously! A potential spoiler is ahead, even though I tried to make it vague) why you wind up in the room you do, instead of the bedroom where you were imprisoned for most of your life.

On the technical side, WH2G2 has a lot of good responses to its custom verbs. There's a lot to keep track of, and my coding self was dreaming up ways to test things so that the game absolutely might not miss a trick in the post-comp release, or maybe I just wanted to see neat tries the author responded to. It's something where if a first-time author hit every instance, they may not have spent enough time on big-picture things. But it also gets so much cluing right, without screaming "Hey! I'm cluing you here! Isn't this nice?" An example that drove this home was in your sister's room:

(Spoiler - click to show)excite bottom drawer
The drawer rattles, but it doesn't open like curtains or a door. It really needs to be pulled to open.


You never do get around to controlling everything directly. But you can do enough to unlock the mystery of why you are where you are. It's not a straight-up amnesia game, as the denouement shows. You learn things about people close to you. To me it mirrored "hey, do I have a right to feel negatively about person X?" So verbs do get more emotionally charged than EXCITE, which only rattles things slightly. As mentioned above, a few are rejected as undoable as your character learns and grows. This is addition by subtraction. Having too many verbs near the end would have potentially made things much tougher and slowed the game pace to where the big scenes had less impact.

So I have a lot of good things to say about WH2G2. I'm very glad I got the chance to test it before it went to IFComp, and my only regret is that when I swapped games with the author, I somehow missed the email with the binary attached. Revisiting it a month later, I noticed a lot of things I missed the first time around. They were silly technical things that don't really affect the overall game, the sort of thing that's a good excuse for a post-comp release to get alittle more publicity. But I pretty much was worrying about the sort of coding details that thrill longer-time writers like me. And I think they balanced coding and story quite well. About the only thin I remember is something others alluded to: the colored-door puzzle felt a bit artificial. But really, I have no suggestions how I would've done it, and after all, if that had been a roadblock to WH2G2 entering IFComp, we'd all have lost out.

One tangential thing about WH2G2 is that when I went to ask Inform questions of my own, I noticed the author posting lots of good questions on the board. I don't remember them, or how they fit technically in WH2G2, but it enhanced the game for me as follows. I sadly met some Evas and Ians in computer science courses I had or even on the job. No physical restraint, of course, and it wasn't as radical as Eva and Ian. Maybe it was just brushing me aside, or explaining I really should know certain terms or conventions. (Later, I would google said terms and give these other people more credit than they deserved for expanding my horizons.) So these people talked over me and left me feeling I should really take a back seat. Many of them are long since gone, but the way WH2G2 unfolded allowed me to (far less dramatically) put several of these people in the rear-view mirror. And I do think that after saying "gee, why didn't I ask these sorts of questions years ago?" I sat down and asked a few good ones of my own. So that was positive. And I in turn appreciated the author's hard work and good questions for Fourbyfouria.

On replaying WH2G2 to write this review, I took notes and wanted to check another detail. It wouldn't be hard. Abstractly, you just plug in the right verbs, and the game's well-clued without holding your hand, so it's no problem to figure out. I had a few problems the first time through, which I chalked up to bad memory and having a bunch of other games to look at, as well as enjoying it. I had one more detail to check off, so I re-re-played. And I still bungled a few of the puzzles. Not due to my laziness or bad cluing, but because I realized it'd let me Think About Stuff in a positive new way, and the thought I put into things during and after the game replaced my technical memory. So it wasn't just something cool to solve. That's pretty rare and, I think, not something you can just summon at-will.

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Off-Season at the Dream Factory, by B.J. Best (writing as “Carroll Lewis")

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Orcs have feelings too. Let Dud share his with you., November 29, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

I'm glad Adventuron exists. I think it fills a gap between pure-choice engines and Inform. It's not too rigorously pointed to pure text or to specific web effects. Certainly when I learned about Inform, I felt as though I had to learn all the verbs and their default behaviors, which was fun for a while when I wanted to feel competence, but then it just annoyed me to feel I had to. The person behind Adventuron has done great things to keep it simple yet attractive. You have the picture in the top half and the text prompts in the bottom. There are relatively few basic verbs--unlink Inform, Adventuron never felt a need to pay homage to Infocom with rarely-used ones. But of course you can define more. For those who want, you can have colored text or the fonts you want. And OSatDF seems better suited to Adventuron than a choice-based engine or Inform. It looks for a homage to, well, Lewis Carroll and is very successful, while still being its own story.

You play Zildud "Dud" Henderson, an orc who works at a Dream Factory. That's where non-orc clients beat up orcs for fun and adventure or, at any rate, excitement that helps keep the economy going. This isn't the first game to look at how the bad guys live, but it does give a credible view into how they could live and not really be the bad guys. Dud's not good at his job, but it makes money. His human co-worker, Jonathan, sympathizes with having to deal with his fairy boss, who doesn't understand why Dud fails to even put up a fight. Can't he get over it and be a decent employee? Not actually kill the enemies, of course. After all, they don't kill him. Employees all wear reanimators, which ensure you can come back from that in-between world to face a new foe? Just, Dud needs to do better, for himself and for his boss. And yet, he doesn't want to spend his whole life getting beaten up. To make things more complex, his father was a lot better at his job than Dud but got killed when his reanimator glitched.

Dud's first trip to work is, well, a dud. Not for the player, necessarily. There's a maze to start, and there's a trick to the maze, and once you're 3/4 of the way through, the game stops giving you chances to mess up, which is really nice of it. The forest maze pictures change nicely enough, and I almost felt a bit upset when Dud reached the clearing outside MEI (Dud's employers) and I wouldn't have to do that again. In this clearing, you have Dud wait and fight enemies, give a good effort (hopefully) and then enter the office to get more gold for humans to beat you up and take. The injuries are all mental, but they're there. The game's forgiving each time you lose, though if you've played before, or you really grind at the puzzles, you need only lose once, at the start. You have about the same hit points, but you generally do about 2 damage per round to the humans' 10.

How to rectify this? Dud's mother suggests he talk to his Uncle, an Orcish Lewis Carroll-a-like. There's a vulgar history book with orcs as brutes, etc., and Uncle Carroll discusses his feelings on it, but he has more practical advice. It seems painfully random at first, until you realize that there are spells involved. If Dud can learn defensive spells that tie enemies up, he can defeat opponents without hurting them. There are five such spells, which use Adventuron's rainbow text quite well. To find them, you alternate between reality and a sewer that contains runoff from the dream factory. For each item you find, you get a spell. They're tied in with Carroll's famous poem Jabberwocky, so you have stuff like wax lips and cabbage cloud and royal robe. (Talk of cabbages and kings, if you forgot.)

The contrast between the real world dream world(s) is quite effective. Your dream world is based on the cheap freebie experience potential clients get which, of course, is no-frills and low-res. The font is blocky and so are the corridors. Even a snake guarding an important item is extremely lumpy. So there's a great contrast in graphics, simply done. The dream world, in addition, has a different set of directions (forward, turn around, left and right, and you can type in just the first letter) from outside, and I thought that too was a nice hat-tip to first-person RPGs. It's the right size, and it doesn't sprawl, either. Finally, the combats have a cursive-ish font which is right at home. I've heard boring (to me) discussions of Evocative Fonts before, and they left me shaking my head, but OSatDF proved to me that, yes, it can be a very positive thing, and it doesn't have to be complex.

Once you have the spells you need, combat is pretty easy, and the descriptions of enemies (clearly quite different and weird to your orcish self, with their odd mannerisms and clothes) flailing around is pretty funny. You can just use trial and error to figure who gets befuddled be which spells. A story develops: your boss, who abused you for being no good, seems quite upset now you've gotten good. She is hiding something, clearly. And there's a climactic scene at the end I don't want to spoil.

OSatDF brings up many serious issues without really being heavy. When I got the game to test, I was worried it might be Just Another Carroll Tribute, and later I worried it might veer into My Lousy Job territory, but it quickly proved to be more than that. There's the surface complaint of "that orc you beat up had a family, too!" but OSatDF explores it, along with issues like what it means to have a demeaning service-industry job where the customer is always right. Or, in some cases, how to deal with people who want to defeat you in an argument–but not too easily! Or they want to pretend they had a challenge without actually having one. And while LavaGhost's review brought up more serious points, I had really only considered the dream factory clients as a similar, lesser version of people who go to Africa to "hunt" exotic animals bigger than they are.

Both endings were satisfying to me, where Zildud has a moral choice. I also think the last lousy point was quite apt. It was independent of any puzzles and definitely in tune with "a modern interpretation of (classic work X)" and made me laugh. At the same time, it showed one more way Dud was surveilled and, yet, gave a small message of encouragement from Uncle Carroll. Which is quite good, because with a Lewis Carroll poem as inspiration, a game like OSatDF could try to be too wacky. Fortunately, it imagines things that are quite real and preposterous at the same time, and it almost seems like escapism until you take a bit of time to consider Dud's employer, MEI, being both quite shady and pedestrian at the same time. They're offering people wild fun! What's wrong with that? Well, only certain SORTS of people.

I think the only other game I've seen that treats Orcs as the civilized guys is Magic Candle III, an RPG from 25+ years ago. It was great fun, with a lot of jabs at uncivilized humans. And I think I put in a silly bit in Ailihphilia where you get a "we're not the same" response for feeding a troll ort to the cross orc or ergot ogre. This is considerably deeper than both, of course, with a stronger story angle. I think it's effective and doesn't lean on the original material too much. You never get a "Look at me I'm literary" vibe from it. The author got a lot of small things right that a book just can't do.

On replay I was slightly upset the puzzles were easy to remember. Like the in-game antagonists, I suppose, I wanted to win quickly, but not too quickly. I grumped when it folded like Dud. But that cleared the way for some of the less whimsical themes the author hoped to address. Yet I can still take it as a fun game. I have to admit I forgot I tested it for some reason. It had been a few months, but it's memorable enough. Still, I was glad to piece together the parts I didn't quite remember. It's much more serious than it seems, if you want it to be. Or it can just be a lot of fun.

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RetroCON 2021, by Sir Slice

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Several small, simple and very retro games in one, November 28, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

I snickered at the thought of a slice-of-life game from someone named Sir Slice. There are a few other laughs sprinkled throughout this Twine effort where you attend a retro convention that features various slot machines and retro games. Despite this being a convention, there aren't people to talk to but just games to play. There's a variety of gambling–-the usual suspects-–but also a small parser adventure (pretty impressive, given this is Twine) and a football simulation and a card game called Double Dead Zed. You can leave at any time.

I really lean towards the gaming aspect of text adventures, but given that I was at a convention, I was expecting to interact with people, discuss cool retro stuff uncovered in the past year, and so forth. It seems there were opportunities, e.g. after winning the card game, you could find someone else who was pretty good at it or could show you other interesting retro stuff. That said, RetroCon shows a lot of neat basic tricks of stuff you can do with Twine. Maybe the lack of story encouraged me to poke around in the source, and I found how the parser game got written to be particularly interesting. However, this makes RetroCon 2021 a bad fit for IFComp, because even if it doesn't hit the classic puzzles everyone may be a bit tired of, none of the games really matter or tie you into something deeper. That said, the card game helped prepare me for some other comp entries that are a lot longer and also had card games.

The gambling stuff is fairly standard: Keno, slots, video poker, horse races, and so forth. The horse race reminded me of an Apple game that randomly raced horses and impressed me so much as a kid. It has a $5 cap on betting (you start with $100,) as if to note that gambling too much at once is a bad idea. With all my poking at the source, I forgot to try what happened if you went broke, so that is maybe something to revisit. As for Keno--I remember being overwhelmed by the flashing text and lights of a pirated Apple game of Keno when I was a kid. I never figured out what to do. I figured it must be terribly complicated. I felt ripped off when I learned the utter lack of strategy and also that I was able to calculate easily what a losing proposition it was. So that brought back memories of a sort.

Dozen Dead Zed is a simple card game. You must kill exactly 12 of your computer opponent's players. Cards you draw may kill 1, 2 or 3, and you can also draw a weapon card. There are other special cards like injure, first aid, jam (opponent's gun) and so forth. You can't actually use a 3-kill card unless you have a shotgun, and you can't use a 2-kill if you have a knife, and so forth. Injured players can discard all five of their cards and start over. It took me a bit to figure what to do, but the strategy seemed nontrivial, though sometimes you were just out of luck with bad cards.

There's also a two-minute drill where your football team is down 4 points with two minutes left. The game constantly reminds you a field goal won't do. This could have been tweaked a bit, because how many time-outs you have is important in the actual game. I got lucky with two down-the-middle long passes, since the clock seemed to stop no matter what, and an incompletion took the same time as a completion. Then I short-passed my way to a touchdown. So the balance may have been off, but it had that retro feel and reminded me of a low-res football game I loved to play on the Apple. You typed in your play and the defense's. If your team got a first down, the randomly generated crowd colors changed and it made a clapping noise. I miss it.

The parser game, Uncle Jim's Will, was most interesting to me. Your Uncle has died, and you must find the buried treasure in his house. Given that the game advertises CrappyParser as its engine, you can't expect it to be very good. Its super-blunt error messages heckle, almost bordering on trolling: "What in the world makes you think you can go east?" Though it is complex, as you do have the ability to TALK X ABOUT Y. And while there aren't many items in the game, you have alternate solutions. You can feed or play with the dog, and while you can probably guess where the treasure is without the map, there are two places to use the bronze key before it breaks, and if you get the map and not the spade, your neighbor loans you a shovel. So I thought the parser game was economical, and I put the heckling down to, well, the parser's name. I was also amused that, when I left the game unattended, it had about ten different nags to tell me to get moving, already.

After doing all this, you can go back to your hotel room, get some sleep, and leave whenever you want. I was disappointed not even to be able to attend a lecture about projects for RetroCon 2022 or cool games that got lost and found or whatever. The whole game seems to describe things as "kinda neat" or "yeah, that was fun" and I think I caught a "you guess you can." So don't expect emotional impact, as RetroCon 2021 feels like it'd work great as a programming tutorial. The parser is legitimately impressive. I don't know if it's been done before. I saw input text before in a game (ShuffleComp?) and I remember a review calling it a brilliant take-down of parser games, so seeing a serious effort, CrappyParser's flippant self-depreciating and you-depreciating aside, was neat.

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4x4 Archipelago, by Agnieszka Trzaska

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
randomized, replayable, and very focused RPG, November 27, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

In the author's forum, I had planned to start this review a different way. "This game's quite good, but the end was frustrating. I just couldn't figure how to beat the final boss. It was a lot of fun, but after a while, you just want to get through with it, you know?” I knocked off another shorter game or two, then came back to try just one more thing and, uh, wound up trying a few more after the final boss. I then wound up seeing if I could play through faster the second time through, and despite the shortcuts I'd learned, I spent about the same time overall, nailing down the quests I didn't quite solve before or maybe trying different reward options. Which will tell you how involving I found the game.

It's quite pretty impressive technically: a procedurally generated RPG where you bounce between sixteen islands on a grand quest that, itself, is randomly determined. There are thirty possibilities for each game: ten classes, based on a combination of two skills, and three big-picture quests. The Tragic Queen's Relics lead you to a randomly placed tomb you must ask the locals about. Another quest has four map pieces. A third has you ascend the Heavenly Spire to fix odd weather with black snow. There's variety in the classes, too. I started as an Explorer, which let me build up experience and silver by just talking to locals. My next time as a Battle Mage, I didn't have that quick start, but I had a lot of fun blasting enemies every which way. As of the end of IFComp, I had some clear favorites for winning quickly. I wound up playing 4x4 before games in genres I was unsure around. So, yes, I won with all ten and enjoyed the varying challenges. I was especially thrilled to find (Spoiler - click to show)a "bribe" sub-skill let me use that excess silver to get half-experience in combat, which saved real-world time. I tweaked my bribing strategy for a bit. And, as I replayed, I alternated between favorite non-fighting skills, or between ranged or melee weapons, each of which works better for different fights.

And this speaks to some pretty impressive balance in 4x4. You may have noticed "experience by talking to locals" above. Generally, when you think of information in an RPG, it's stuff you'll know the second time through, so why waste time clicking through the thought-bubbles? Well, a lot does carry over here, but more importantly, asking the right people for information gets you experience points, so you don't need to fight early on--and with some classes, fighting early is a bad option. You can barely beat Giant Rats. You can, however, drink repeatedly at the first inn you find to get enough advice/experience to get that first level-up.

You also can get experience solving nonviolent quests. This experience can be pumped into five minor skills that improve luck, HP, MP, strength and magic power. They start at zero, and the requirements for the next level double until you hit level 5, when it's capped. Or you can bump your main class skills up to the maximum of level 2, or you can also pay for a third skill. One really cool thing I noticed on replay is that you need a balance between quick improvement and saving your experience for level 2 main skills. And also after a few plays I enjoyed understanding the game well enough not to need a third main skill. At first I found these caps restrictive, but soon I realized they signpost how you don't need to grind too much.

That's not to say you should ignore good quick ways to grind. 4x4 allows you to make silver pretty quickly. Several islands have markets that sell one of food, luxury items and/or crafting materials and buy the other two, one at an extra markup. So establishing these trading routes early is good, and yes, the Trading skill makes things extra lucrative. I remember being so thrilled I could make any sort of profit that I missed a way to maximize. It involved, quite simply, having a small 4x4 grid of what market sold what. I expanded it to other things the useful in-game journal couldn't quite organize. It felt about right--I didn't want everything done for me, and I liked having my own shorthand to target where to go. The journal's a neat way to keep track of stuff, and while it wasn't too wordy, it was still neat to be able to search the text for what I needed, even something like whether a dungeon was cleared. Between it and the auto-saves when you moved between islands or visited a mine or dungeon, I was really happy I didn't need to backtrack or remember annoying details. It also lessened the intimidation of having a lot dumped on me as I explored islands.

Perhaps the neatest bit is something I didn't see until replay. You have a chance for quests and incidents when you travel between islands, and "explore the island" can also give random encounters. Some are one-time, which means experienced players have to decide what to buy and how much to save. While save-and-restore is a possibility if you get a quest you're not prepared for, micromanaging briefly ruined the game flow for me, and I had to decide what was worth retrying and what wasn't. But you also have rumor-quests, eight of them, from a pool of twenty-four. Every island has rumors to check. Some are random. Others lead to the quests. Many of these have several ways through: you can fight or expend equipment or use skills--noncombat ones are prominent here, which is great for balance, and using them also fleshes out storylines you don't see if you just clobber the baddies bothering the villagers. Some, you can buy your way through with the right materials. The tougher quests might require a lot to avoid a tough fight, but the random unique rewards for solving them makes each playthrough interesting. The easier quests often give you a choice: renown, silver or experience. The harder ones give renown, experience and a great unique item.

Renown? Well, it seems useless but is key to the game, although silver and experience are more important and accessible early. You get renown for, well, actually acting like a hero, or defeating very tough enemies. Some random adventures give it. For instance, if you have crafting materials and run across a stranded boat, you can demand payment, or you can just give what you've got for renown. First-time players probably should just take the more tangible rewards, because they can't get going that early, but more experienced players will want renown in order to get quick access to the adventurers' guild on the main island. It can sometimes be quite random how much you get, based on your rumor-quests and when certain quests show up, but there's a way to prepare, and more importantly there are two cute ways to buy renown. They are (Spoiler - click to show)donating to the Academy, which is a heck of a quid pro quo, and paying minstrels to write a song about you, which is self-promotional in its own way. One thing I find amusing about renown and solving quests in general is that 10+ renown lets you rest free at inns--this isn't a game-breaker, but combined with one-offs where people recognize you and give you powerful items for (for instance) defeating a mist-monster at sea, the attention is almost slightly embarrassing, especially once you have more silver than you could ever spend.

But it takes a while to get there, and in the meantime, I liked how 4x4 made it so it was hard to be fully busted. As you travel between islands, you may gain or lose MP or HP, or tradeable items may get washed out from your boat or onto it. Your fortune stat (aka luck) controls this a bit--I think. You may also find NPC (mer-folk when sailing, hunters on the island) willing to sell you special armor or goods to trade for a profit or buy at a discount, and sometimes you just get small experience boosts for avoiding traps in the small dungeons. With all the random quests, you also have places that reliably give fights, though exploring may give experience and good items quicker. There are three such places (bandits, beasts and undead) placed on random isles, and you can visit the easy or hard sector, so they keep their value without screaming "GRIND HERE."

The procedurally generated text works well, too. There are possibilities for all sorts of contradictions if you try for less generic text, but they don't really pop up. The island descriptions are fun, as are the stories you can get from locals, and having them around really complements the strategic parts. The quests have a lot of hidden jokes, too. One random rumor quest has an arm-wrestling contest, and if you have maximum brawn, the organizers bribe you to let their son win in the final. Another lets you bribe a Red Knight's squire to find the knight's weakness before a fight. I forgot to mention that you can acquire allies who help (marginally) and one of them knows a bit about the history of the Archipelago and informs you when someone is telling a lie. This is all very vague, but I don't want to spoil the fun of discovery.

What encapsulated 4x4 for me, though, was finding ways to go faster and enjoying them despite missing out on side-quests I enjoyed. You see, it's possible to win the main quest without doing nearly everything. A sea serpent has more HP than two final bosses. One quest in particular involves a Wanderer who visits all sixteen isles. She tells you the terrain of her next isle, and you can consult the journal or the main page that displays them all--the islands are attractively drawn, clearly similar by terrain but not identical. So it's a fun mini-game of chance. It's rewarding to try and solve a bit quicker than you expected, and the choice of items she gives you at the end is very powerful. It helped me before I really figured how to get epic weapons and skills early. I also miss the Coral City, a place you can only find by luck until you have access to the Academy. It's a maze with nonreciprocal paths, but it works very well, and I don't want to spoil more.

Add all this up, and you can guess I really enjoyed 4x4A, both as a player and someone who enjoys learning about design, and both for the novelty of the first couple playthroughs and the enjoyment of honing strategy later. Strictly by the rules, it was probably a bit long for IFComp, but I was glad it was in there--it boosted me between games that weren't in my genre. I felt almost a bit guilty reporting bugs I only saw because I was really paying attention. So I really recommend it. It's quite well-balanced, and the randomization makes each playthrough different enough that 4x4 never quite get old. Each time I've sat down to play, it's fun to uncover quests and islands I've seen before, as something always pops up that I'd half-forgotten.

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Your Death, in Four Acts, by Amanda Walker

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Double the poems in version 2, November 26, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: EctoComp 2021, post comp

The whole "writing an Emily Dickinson poem as IF/text adventure" thing has been done before--just completely differently. It was a (since withdrawn) entry in Ryan Veeder's competition for good Interactive Fiction, and it focused on Emily Dickinson's "There Is No Frigate Like a Book" as opposed to more death-related poems. I was sad to see Reverie go, and I'd be sad to see this entry ever disappear. While I knew of Frigate, I was maybe aware of only one of the poems in Four Acts.

There are no puzzles. In fact, pedestrian actions may push you through a bit quicker than you intended. You must basically roll with the poem's punches, and each poem is included in-game to reference as you wish--so, paradoxically, paying attention to the poems will help you look around at all the mystic entites around you before accessing the one that pushes things along.

Four Acts proceeds from your death to your funeral to a ride with death and immortality to, well, something not worth spoiling. I enjoyed trying to subvert the poem and its responses--for instance, doing the wrong thing with my inventory, or trying to hang with Immortality instead of Death. And I appreciate this sort of thing, as someone stuck feeling quite hopeless during the poetry parts of English classes, while better-informed people around me somehow knew what the poems were about but would probably let anyone they caught reading poetry that, well, that was a bit weird and impractical. I guess I like to be able to poke around and not worry if I'd missed anything.

The author was disappointed she couldn't fit in everything she wanted for EctoComp, and while I liked the original Your Death in Two Acts, the new bits make everything even nicer. Perhaps I'm the gullible sort who says "gee, okay, either way works great" when asked to just choose one, already. But here, I'll go in for the equally squishy "gee, more poems are better."

Most post-comp editions are worth playing to see what the author tweaked and maybe see a clearer way through, or they're an excellent exercise for the author to nail down things they didn't quite have time for. But Four Acts is a completely new offering, and I don't blame the author for wanting to share it as soon as EctoComp was over. If you enjoyed Two Acts during EctoComp, then I think you'll want to check this out. There's double the poems and some nice fixes to implementation.

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The Deer Trail, by Dark Forest Media

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Strong story, fixable issues (for comp version), November 25, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: EctoComp 2021, EctoComp

The Deer Trail may not be perfect, but it certainly left a good impression on me despite some technical flaws. It starts out as a deer hunt but then turns into a lot more. This is both bad and good; the motivation for finding the next item struck me as because-it-is-there, the game was organized so as to reveal secrets in the form of letters, up until the conclusion. But despite my criticisms below, I was impressed overall. Sometimes knowing what pitfalls to expect can help a person enjoy a work's strong points. That is this review's goal, because I think The Deer Trail deserves it. I suspect my major concerns will be obsolete if the author creates a post-comp version.

It starts as you manage to shoot a huge deer with your bow and arrow to start, but it's only wounded. So it flees. Early on, The Deer Trail gives you instructions of what verbs to use to hunt and track the deer, and eventually you wind up by a house. Somehow, the deer made it in, despite a locked door. You will need to follow. There are places to the side of the deer's trail of blood that hold tools and such.

Once you're in the house, things get a bit surreal, which isn't necessarily bad, but fetching the items for later does feel a bit arbitrary. Through the house, there are three journals which give the deer's backstory. Along the way you find items you have to combine together, which makes sense once you figure what to do, but you do have to pay attention to the scenery. And perhaps one is a bit too heavy-handed, since it's called chemical compound A.

This dents the emotional impact of the story. As do the achievements, which seem like a good idea to nudge you to explore everything. Perhaps "discovery" would be better? This is sort of quibbling, but word choices do matter. And some achievements seem more like thanks for paying attention than tension building. But it could build to more, in a post-comp release--maybe at the end the author could cue you to what you missed. I also found some nuisance in having to "use stairs" instead of going up or explicitly look in a cabinet after opening it.

The Deer Trail feels like it really sprawls, and it could be cut down (the three letters you find could be, in particular--maybe break them into four or five? Though maybe the trivial fix of throwing in a few "press and key" commands would work. Also, it would be nice to be able to read them separately, once you have more than one.) But I was interested and captivated and have no concrete suggestions what to leave out. Speaking as a horror novice, it seemed to avoid cliches and (oops, cliche alert) cover a lot of bases. Enough to clearly overcome minor technical issues, for me.

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A Ghost Story, by Nils Fagerburg

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Circling around a mysterious tower, November 25, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: EctoComp 2021, EctoComp

A Ghost Story is a relatively simple eight-room game where you may have to cycle around everywhere a bit before you find what's going on. It's the sort of thing Speed-IF was meant for, and I think the author chose the material and scope well.

As in The Libonotus Cup, the interface and appearance are quite attractive. Here you have white text on a black background, and when you're clued to the exits, they're orange, so hooray for Halloween colors. The directions appear nonreciprocal at first, but (Spoiler - click to show)if you map things out, they form a sort of octagon which makes sense later. There's a white tower in the middle you can't get to or pull away from, as well as an Igor (that's deliberate,) a poultrygeist, a Sphinx and a locked gate. What to feed the poultrygeist was a neat lateral thinking puzzle.

I was stuck with what to do for a while, because I was trying to coast through, and I can't say I missed a puzzle per se, but I was glad to find the next items that led to me getting to the tower. (I don't think it's a spoiler to explain that, yes, you need to get there.) Each was a small fetch quest, and (Spoiler - click to show)each room has a purpose of sorts.

A Ghost Story isn't especially deep, and you've probably seen all the elements before, but it is well done. I quite enjoyed how it corrected some misspellings I made. For four hours' work, it's quite good.

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Hercules!, by Leo Weinreb

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Mythology without the Importancy, November 24, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Hercules! raised some warning flags that I'm happy to say were just flags. First, it drew heavily from mythology, not the first IFComp game to do so. Second, it promised yucks, specifically yucks with a main character who's less than cool (eczema, asthma, lack of strength in general, perhaps mild OCD that is used to help Hercules know which task on the list is next.) Third, I was worried it might play a bit too dumb about Hercules or make the twelve tasks trivial. There's also the general possibility it would either force you to know too much mythology, or it would imagine all the wrong thing.

However, overall, knowing a bit of mythology helps the puzzles go down easier. And Hercules may be more brain than brawn, but not in the "look at all the weird stuff you know, you dork you" sort of way. He uses his wit to solve impossible-seeming tasks given to him by his cruel cousin, Eurystheus. Twelve total, just as in the mythology. Yes, the list says ten, but if you remember your mythology, you'll know why this is faithful, and it may even provide a hint. (Spoiler - click to show)Hercules got dinged for enlisting help on two of the original ten. So that was well-played. And while some of the puzzles feel like a stretch, the game's supposed to be the clever side of silly, and overall it works. The payoff in laughs is more than good enough. However, since there are twelve diverse puzzles that really all should work, there's a good chance one could be a stopper. So don't feel guilty consulting a walkthrough to keep the fun going.

Hercules is the sort of game that could fall apart at any time, because it's a farce, and "wait, it got TOO corny" is always a step away. But then I looked back once done and it never did. There's some suspension of disbelief I am a-okay with. Trick guns did not exist B.C., and neither did asthma inhalers. So if you're the sort of person who thinks a clever obvious anachronism invalidates a piece of work, well, you will miss out. Also, I like how Hercules, so bad at physical stuff, bounces from isle to isle. It reminds me of The Adventures of the President of the United States, an IFComp entry from way back when, where you were the President and did very silly things as you traveled to rooms labeled Canada and Mexico and whatever. That game's jokes landed but never quite came together. Hercules does better. The puzzles are a bit deeper, and they were a lot more fun than the times I was assigned mythology for an English class. I felt undedicated because I had trouble moving up from D'Aulaires. I wanted it still to be fun! Well, now I've had some fun mythology. That showed those adults from my distant past whose names I don't even remember!

The first quest with the lion establishes the sorts of jokes you're going to see: your cousin gives you a gun to shoot the lion, but it's a stage prop. You want to cut the lion's fur, but you're allergic. And so on. You enlist the help of your troublemaker nephew Iolaus for another task. Some areas are closed, because you panic if you do tasks out of order, and you don't want to visit certain scary places without a good reason. This is a creative way to help the player not wander too much, and certainly my big-picture fear starting out was "what if I go on completely the wrong tangent when discovering where to go?" While this whole ordering-the-tasks restriction may leave you stuck, overall I think it helps prevent sprawl. Though really, the game's not very big. At twenty room-countries, with at most one thing to do in each, you can cross them off and move on. But if you don't know your ancient Greek geography, it's a bit hard to envision, so I appreciated all the bumpers I could get.

The gags (and in-game hints) all held up well enough to get me through the maze on Crete (of course there's one! Every big text adventure that pokes at conventions needs a maze and a few cool ways to subvert it.) There were a few joke solutions, a few trivial solutions, and a few slightly odd ones, like what to do with a frozen ham. I admit to using the walkthrough a bit, but everything was sensible enough that on playing again in a few weeks to revisit the fun, I was able to logic everything out. The backstory with how Hera hates you is amusing, too. I forgot why this is the case in actual mythology until I googled afterwords, but I like how it's covered here. Hercules genuinely has no clue why Hera hates him or could hate him. He assumes it's because he's just clumsy and such. It reminds me of adults I was probably smarter than, hiding stuff from me as a kid, and not figuring the secrets is less shameful now. Hercules doesn't think of that sort of thing--and, as a side point, I'm glad the game doesn't play the "HA HA HERCULES IS BAD WITH GIRLS" angle, which would've made me cringe.

So Hercules! does a good job of playing slightly dumb without veering off into stupid territory or abusing its protagonist. Its easy targets are about silly laughs, which may seem unambitious, but it just hits so many of them. It reminded me of an Internet study done where people seemed to think mean people knew more. Hercules is definitely not a mean game, whether to its main character or you, the player who may not remember their mythology. It doesn't seem to know much, because it doesn't force anything in your face. There are enough jokes to distract you along the way that you never feel lectured to. Maybe it's the amusing ranks you gain for each quest you solve. Or perhaps it reminds you of your own physical or emotional weaknesses without cutting you down. It had a lot more heart than I thought it would, and the jokes that made me roll my eyes also made me smile.

It also reminds me of the quote from Amadeus where Mozart asks "Come on now, be honest! Which one of you wouldn't rather listen to his hairdresser than Hercules? Or Horatius, or Orpheus?" Well, here, we are Hercules, and we'd rather be him than the other mythological characters who sit on thrones or what-have you.

Oh, and on the self-indulgent side, I was thrilled to see someone with a last name of "Weinreb" enter IFComp. I considered Bernie Weinreb as a pen name for Ailihphilia, but I went with N.Y. Llewellyn and, in the second version, Sir Apollo Paris (mythology tie-in, sort of!) I commented on this and wasn't surprised the author himself was aware of, and enjoyed, that sort of speculation.

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Starbreakers, by E. Joyce and N. Cormier

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
old school logic puzzles with neat twists, November 23, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

I don't think you're supposed to get what's going on right away, here. It seems like just an escape-the-spaceship puzzle with other terrain thrown in later. We've sort of seen the puzzles on offer, too, but in a different context. Each has enough of a twist to make Starbreakers a much bigger game even before the big reveal.

Certainly, when the authors throw a Zebra Puzzle/Einstein's Logic type puzzle at you, along with other puzzles (filling and emptying buckets) you hope there's a bit more. The authors themselves are experienced enough. The writing is good. So you feel there should be. And there is. The mystery unravels as you become privy to instant messages around you that don't seem to be relevant. And as someone who's just trying to get through all the IFComp entries I didn't write, I cut corners and missed a few clues I didn't see until I hit the game's end, where it helpfully recaps said messages, and you see how they fit. For the record, I recommend going with the flow of puzzles you've seen before. There's a strong enough story to complement the puzzles. Let's just say after playing this, I'm definitely interested in the authors' other collaboration(s), as well. I hope that's enough of an endorsement.

Part of the twist is that it'd be wrong for you the character NOT to be oblivious, though you the reader may see something clearly up. Fatal and non-fatal mistakes are punished in roughly the same way, with the game cycling back to the last point you were safe. The game asks you for your name with "You should probably report in too. You search for the words; your mind feels terribly foggy. Your name is... it's..." Typing in actual words is then reserved only for specific puzzles, such as breaking a code, which is less intimidating than it sounds. First, you get an easy one, then you get a variation on the theme. For others, such as Towers of Hanoi or the Zebra-style puzzle or even shifting water between buckets, clicking works and works well. Apparently, there's hard mode, but I didn't want to risk messing up and having to restart. I made enough mistakes in the name of expedience (I'll call it expedience and not mental limitations) and the "oops you died" message should have provided me with more clues.

Because you're trying to figure who the traitor is who sabotaged the spaceship, and weird things happen. Someone else dies and pops up again. There's subtler stuff, like the companion named Andrew who got too crossed up in various logic puzzles instead of actually doing something. (Err, no comment there! The authors assured me this wasn't intentional.) Everyone else seems to have their hang-ups, too. You seemed to be the one really doing stuff, figuring stuff out. All the while you were being watched by others. The game does some fourth-wall stuff like "this sure is a weird way to unlock a chest" but things probably won't be clear until the game's over, and you can read what's happening outside your spaceship.

As I mentioned above, the logic puzzles aren't just "look what I can code." The bucket-balancing one where you had seven total units of water to throw around required 3-2-2 distributions in buckets of size 7, 4 and 3. This is a nice twist that doesn't drown the players in complexities. For the Zebra logic puzzle, the clues are less brute-force than "person X was not in room Y" without getting too conditional. The first letter-replacement cryptogram--well, a solution can be written quickly in Python. What is all this leading to, though? And why are certain details not quite right?

Even without the twist ending I would have tipped my hat to the successful efforts to give old logic problems new life in unexpected ways. And I in fact misunderstood the plot and had a laugh, then another one when the authors said "this is what we meant." I was pretty close, and I won't spoil it fully, but it made me laugh because (Spoiler - click to show)a coffee machine is part of why everything goes haywire, and as someone who does not like coffee, coffee machines, people talking about how they need coffee in the morning, or people talking about what coffee is good coffee and bad coffee, or people who have had their morning coffee and suddenly switched to "why can't you be as perky as me" mode, or seeing coffee beans in a filter in the wastebasket, I was glad to see it as a quasi-villain. (Okay, I don't hate the stuff THAT much. But I sure have fun hating it. As hates go, I hope it's harmless. And my apologies to the authors if they actually like, well, that.)

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The Library, by Leonardo Boselli

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A fun romp through well-loved classics, November 23, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

If an entry in IFComp is going to have one word (articles don't count,) then "Library" has to be up there near the top for me. I enjoy searching libraries, hanging out in them, or just finding a new city library branch to visit when, okay, I could've pulled an intralibrary loan, but I wanted some minimal adventure. And I wasn't disappointed. It's quite a fun game, and the writing is smooth, no small feat when English is not the writer's first language.

After meeting with an odd librarian and given a red pill (don't worry, here a pill is just a pill,) you're sent into a maze of twelve rooms, each named after a famed author, to rescue Edmond Dantes. Yes, a maze of twelve rooms–each has three others adjacent, and instead of compass directions, you can go back, left and right. Left (or right) then back from one room always leads you to that room.

TLDR for the comp release: the map is the trickiest part of the game, and I want to mention it up front, because it's well worth having a map by your side to subvert this, so the actual fun bits flow. Don't map it yourself, unless you really enjoy that sort of thing. Crib off someone else so the story doesn't get buried. The author originally meant to have 20 rooms in a Hunt the Wumpus sort of dodecahedron structure but cut it to twelve, leaving a few odd loops. The numbers just don't work out to make things symmetrical. Left and right looping in the first room gives two tidy pentagons, but then the map gets stickier. However, for the post-comp release, everything may be more symmetrical.

That said, the interface overall provides a good deal of innovative convenience. It's text at the top, and you can click on the important things to examine them. Books are the big one. In each library room, clicking on a book opens it, where you open it to enter the book itself. Then you find a bookmark to read the relevant passage that helps you understand what to do. Then you can drag and drop one item onto another to see if they work together. You can, of course, escape with no penalty if you're missing an item from another book. So the game has a parser feel without, well, fighting the parser.

So it helps to make a relatively smooth game once you enter the book in the actual room. Which is pretty cool, because though the idea of book crossovers has been done before, often in other books, having twelve to choose from is quite a task! In a linear book, it might be a bit messy, but here, there's a lot of fun. It may be tough to figure what to do first, as there's a lot of randomness involved, and there's no really logical way to say "Hey, I have to read this book first." It's not chronological. But I really enjoyed how some items linked up. You need to use Alice's cake to make someone grow. You need a way to kill Dracula. Dr. Frankenstein repairs someone's body with surgery. Edmond Dantes gets swallowed by the whale as in Pinocchio, with a crossover to Moby Dick. The connections are whimsical and quickly make sense most of the time. For me it was a bit odd to see Ulysses do something to get himself killed, until I realized, given the authors, where the action would lead. This all was a bit of a stretch–taking one step back to take two forward–but it was still entertaining.

The only thing I disliked about the interface was how left/back/right, for navigation, seemed to change order arbitrarily, making the maze even trickier. So when I wanted to try to loop to the left, or to the right, I had to pay more attention. And sometimes the page-turning special-effect, while a nice surprise in the introduction, wasn't what I wanted when I was trying to figure a puzzle. The author knows of this, and they were really receptive to feedback in-comp, so if there is a post-comp version, this may not be a problem for you.

But the puzzles are fun, and you really only need a passing familiarity with any of the books in the game. We all know the story of Gulliver being the giant, or Ulysses and the cyclops, and The Library weaves them together quite well. It kept me entertained and then some.

Sticklers will point to the map, or how some of the book scenarios are a bit off. Or how you have to take one step backwards to take two forward, e.g. by getting Ulysses killed. This may not be peak narrative and puzzles, but it's more than good enough, and it's still a lot of fun. If the rest of the game weren't very smooth, this wouldn't have stood out. Because combining books isn't a shoo-in. For instance, Edward Eager's children's stories are quite fun, as they go poking into other books, but there's a bit too much fourth-wall stuff and overt self-awareness and "ooh what a mess we made," and not enough getting on with it. Sierra's Mixed Up Mother Goose had its own simplistic charm, but it was mostly a fetch quest that just made sure younger gamers knew heir nursery rhymes, some of which made me cringe even when I was young.

The Library throws stuff together without saying "Ha ha, oops, I'm a bit disorganized, and that's part of the joke." While I think there's work worth doing for a post-comp release, it certainly made my gaming side assume a crossover among my favorite books would be easy. My programming and designing side knows better, and I'm glad The Library made it in, and I think if The Library 2 appeared in a future IFComp, I'd bump it up in the random order the website gave me.

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Kidney Kwest, by Eric Zinda, and Luka Marceta

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Neat concept with perhaps the wrong tool for the job, November 22, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

Kidney Kwest is a short game aimed at kids who need to take medication for chronic kidney disease. I admit I couldn't find details on the condition, but fortunately, you (and kids who need something uplifting) aren't going to be quizzed on the biochemistry at work here. Your task is far less technical: you want to find a costume for a school play. There are plenty of props around. But you also have an inventory limit. You also are very hungry, and after you eat, you need to take a phosphate binder, to get rid of phosphate crystals your kidneys have trouble breaking down. For that, you go inside your body and explore your intestines.

It's pretty simple in the big picture, but it's slowed down by the parser. I realize there's a lot of criticism below, but it's the sort where I had fun despite having these suggestions and despite, thankfully, not having kidney problems. I think back to how I wish I'd had something like this as a kid for health stuff in general. It would have worked so much better than a video or in-person lecture featuring an adult telling you how you'd better take care of your body, because they wish they did.

It's very cheery (both text and graphics) and helpful for the holes you need to fill in with a non-standard parser, though (small warning) I had trouble taking my medicine even when I knew what to do, to the point where I lost and had to restart the game because I didn't get the syntax right. So not penalizing the player for good (I hope) guesses would go a long way. This seems easily fixable, though. TAKE A PHOSPHATE BINDER works.

The nonstandard (and slow) parser also takes a bit of getting used to (I for inventory and X for examine don't work–you have to spell them out) because you also get a warning if you forget to use "THE." The irony here is that the authors are using something that parses natural language, and it in fact brings back the inconveniences modern parsers short-circuited long ago. While the authors make clear their intentions and the software they're using, I think it's a case of maybe pulling something needlessly high-tech.

At the end of the game I had a chance to restart and get another costume. It would be neat if there were an expanded adventure, or some assurance of it. Perhaps more areas inside your body to explore. The first try had five rooms outside your body, and there was only one puzzle.

But I liked what I saw and hope this game, and this sort of project in general (teaching through parser games) continues to grow, and people try combinations they hadn't thought of before. Pure language parsing doesn't seem to be the way to go here, but this could be rectified in a sequel, if the authors chose to branch out, because sadly there are a lot of diseases, and it may not make sense to kids why they have to do things and all the other kids don't, and "because adults said so," no matter how kindly stated, gets a bit annoying.

I feel like a bum poking holes in a game with so much potential to do good. But I know the authors have taken the feedback they've gotten well and made some adjustments to the parser since I played this. I hope they continue to tweak things for this and other educational endeavors.

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The TURING Test, by Justin Fanzo

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
No need to cram, November 22, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

This is a relatively short game that explores what happens when machines take over humanity for their own good. It starts with a questionnaire, asking you various interesting ethical questions about people's purposes and machines'. Your responses will help to pass human traits on to machines, as technology and space exploration evolve.

Then it flashes forward to 2065, when robots have determined that, well, humans aren't going to fulfill their moral obligation to leave the planet a better place than they found it. In a shutdown that puts Y2K, if it had actually been a thing, to shame, machines shut off and rebel. And you're the one to stop it!

This is all quite exciting, as you zip off into space and, as you try to deactivate the robots gone bad (or at least not very good for humans,) you get calls from two entities claiming to be Dr. Ayer, who questioned you about people's purpose in the first part. I was excited to get this correct and get the good ending, but I was also curious about the bad one, which is an eerily nifty artificial "everything is great."

But the problem is, as I looked through the source, I realized this is the only choice that matters. Frequently two choices go to the same next page without setting any variables. This may seem a bit hacker-y, but hey, I am playing a game about robots and such and trying to understand their inner workings, and them trying to understand ours. I guess I was looking forward to a replay where I answered differently, whether it was the survey or other parts. There isn't much. The doctor's responses when you answer the game's initial quiz are, in fact, ELIZA-like.

TURING gets us interested in important and absorbing issues but sadly only touches on them. I have the feeling the author could have done more or will do more in their next effort. The action sequences are well put together, so it's enjoyable, but it seemed to promise a lot more.

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The Spirit Within Us, by Alessandro Ielo

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Thorny subject, some thorny implementation in a custom parser, November 22, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

The Spirit Within Us, by Alessandro Ielo

TSWU, with a relatively simple custom parser, is an interesting effort, for all the required fiddling to get through it. I've read nightmares about homebrew parsers from earlier versions of the comp, but I haven't seen any disasters this year. It's probably a good combination of the soft rules of “have this tested,” better technology, and also better guidelines out there for testing in general. Maybe people are just better connected in order to swap testing as well. Whatever the case, TSWU clearly passes the technical threshold, though there are some shortcuts I wish it had implemented. The ABOUT text says it's based on a tutorial, from which the programmer got a lot of mileage. That a game this solid placed so lowly in IFComp suggests judging standards, and the general quality of an average IFComp game, have risen over the years.

And while the text may be a bit bland for what should be a psychological thriller, and the title seems more like an uplifting rags-to-riches lets-pull-together story than it is ("us" seems to imply there will be friendly NPCs–there aren't,) there are certainly clues as to what is going on, and how it might be disturbing. I think certainly it is best kept as a text adventure, without graphics.

You wake up seeming to have amnesia. You learn you haven't had a drink in a while, but you face something worse than alcoholism. Unsigned notes suggest to you that someone is trying to help you but has had just about enough. Enough of what? That's the story, and the handwritten notes and books left behind provide clues. I found it wasn't too bad to hack my way through to find stuff, although I required the slightly unusual commands X NORTH (or another direction) to turn up some important items.

And it's all quite serviceable. There's a trail of bread-crumb clues to follow. They make sense. There is a final confrontation where the time and health you saved matters, because you have a status meter that drops throughout the game, and it seems you'll have more than enough to win. Well, until that final fight. Also, searching around will reward you–the more food you find, the higher your health will be, though in my notes I see cases where different sorts of berries might take stamina away, and certainly when I saw mushrooms, which are on average deadlier than berries, I saved before eating. The writing also does the job. English is not the writer's main language, so I don't want to jump on them for it, because I wouldn't have the guts to write in a second language OR make my own custom parser, and besides, too much description would probably be a bad thing. Though the descriptions are a bit flat. I think the biggest offender is here:

"You see a lot of boxes and some winter clothes, a torch lays on a shelf.
an empty shelf."

I wouldn't be surprised if the technical hurdles the author had to clear meant they had less time to punch up the game text. It may also have cost them time with design choices. Inventory-fiddling was sadly enough of the game to be a legitimate distraction. You can't just READ PAPER. You have to take it, and you may need to drop something else to get it, and then you need to remember to take that something else again. I (and other viewers) had quite a struggle trying to eat some expired vitamins, but at least they regained me 3 health for my efforts. Some things are too heavy, and it's not clear why e.g. autumn jackets which might be important given the weather. The default rejects seem a bit distracting, so maybe some custom messages would help a post-release. I'd also like to use “it” for the last noun you used, but again, post-comp. And the blue text should be made light-blue so it is easier to see. I checked if other reviewers noticed this and felt it worthy to comment on, and they did.

And I think more detail or flashbacks, or less generic flashbacks, would've highlighted the moral choices more carefully. I wound up pretty much saying "okay, forest maze" and wondering just why the third piece of paper WAS located in the maze and wondering why a branch would be worth taking, since the game's good about not letting you take useless stuff.

For all that, though, there is a buildup to the final fight. Whether or not winning the final fight is the right thing to do is the moral dilemma the author hoped to push. One can't particularly blame the protagonist for going through with it, but apparently you can back out.

This is verifiable. However, the save-game feature was harsh, and that, combined with UNDO saying "you can't change the past" is also slightly annoying. The save files are presented as a list of text commands, which the parser than runs through before. That looks like a problem because some random events happen, e.g. the fight at the end or where and when the fox and dog appear. So you need the forethought to 1) be able to copy a backup save file and 2) set it to read-only to make sure you don't write it over. And this is the only serious technical pitfall of the homebrew parser. It's a tough one to tease out as a programmer or tester, but it illustrates how things can go wrong.

This is all a lot of kvetching, but I think overall the author did well to create such a relatively stable parser to write a coherent, logical game in what was not their language, especially when that executable clocks in at a mere 160KB. So as a technical project it's a success, even if some design choices seemed odd, and it doesn't hit the mark aesthetically. My guess is the author focused on the technical bit to make sure it worked, which was the right first choice, but with more months of preparation and a few more testers, they could have ironed out the other bits. So I hope my criticisms add up to "these are the technical pitfalls to know ahead of time and avoid, and once you do, I think the experience will be satisfying enough."

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Brave Bear, by John Evans

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
You can't hate a game like this, November 22, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

Brave Bear is a short and sweet little game about a teddy bear who senses their owner's terror. It's not perfect, and in fact, there do seem to be cracks in the world-logic. But I ignored them the first time through, and it wasn't until I read some other reviews that I said "Yeah, I noticed that, but..." So I'll save the faults until the end, because it's a nice game to just enjoy and not worry about its imperfections. Also, I'm assuming this is the same John Evans whose previous entries in the comp wree more sci-fi style, so it was really neat to see the change of focus, which I think overall was successful.

There are phantoms to fight through, which you can handle on your own at first. But then you need the help of other toys. They're strewn around the house, and in some cases, you need to figure how to use them. The descriptions are deliberately opaque in certain cases, because part of the fun is figuring what the toy-friend really is. For instance, there's a frog reporter, which people who know the cultural context will figure immediately. Near the end, you take a trip outside to face the final darkness. It's never quite revealed what your owner fears, and it's possible I missed clues, but it seems as though (Spoiler - click to show)your owner's family is moving, and most of your friends are packed away, and your owner is scared, and apparently your owner's parents are apprehensive, too. At least that's what I was moving towards, though the actual few sentences just reference magic in general.

The house isn't very big, and the puzzles aren't very hard. The verbs are generally pretty old-school, and you have a score counter and everything. The trickiest bit at the end was getting the doll. I kept trying to get the transforming robot to transform, and that didn't work, so that was a bit of a loose end, but not really enough to affect my enjoyment.

The comparison game is always a dangerous one, but this brings to mind David Dyte's Bear's Day Out which worked even better for me. I'm still quite happy to have spent a bit of time here, in a sort of escapism without, well, childishness. I could play games like this all day, and if there are a few holes in the narration, they're fun to fill in with your own imagination. I had to suspend my disbelief in parts where I wasn't completely inmmersed, but a game like Brave Bear is a can't-miss effort if the writer shows a decent amount of skill, and that's definitely on display here. So ... stop reading and play the game right now if you're sold. Nitpicks are below.

(Spoiler - click to show)Probably the biggest confusion I had was with the first verb: ATTACK PHANTOM. Teddy bears aren't violent! Perhaps SCARE would've been better, as in "you are a teddy bear, so you can be scary if you have to, but do it too often and you get exhausted." I also wish you'd have used your friends a bit more to do things, beyond just having enough of them to attack a later phantom. And, well, the phantoms aren't really explained at the end. So these are loose strings. When touching this review up I had notes saying "loose strings" and I almost didn't want to go back to replay to check them out, but they're there. They shouldn't ruin the experience, though.

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Weird Grief, by Naomi Norbez

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
When funerals go wrong, November 22, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

This sort of entry does seem to get hammered in IFComp because it is, well, linear, and also because the characters may be part of a social community we just don't understand, though we don't want to look down on others. But it touched a nerve with me in a good way. So I found it valuable. But it's exhibit B in why I find it hard to give stars to fellow IFComp entries. (Exhibit A is that I feel like I'd be knifing a fellow writer in the back if I said nice things but then gave a below-average score.) Exhibit B is that it is hard to compare two very different works, and we know the stars are just a rating, but it's all we have to go on. And complex ratings are too obvious.

But there is a lot to like for an entry that placed so low. First, it links up with another entry from the author's. I played this together with The Dead Account and recommend you to the same, with WG first. They are good on their own but sum nicely together well, and neither takes too long to play. The Dead Account revisits the events of Weird Grief and provides some sort of closure to things Weird Grief left open. I appreciated Weird Grief not explaining everything and letting me speculate, and I was satisfied with how The Dead Account tied things up.

Second of all, the title. It says a lot in ten letters. Grief should be grief. And it hurts to be called weird in any context, with or without justification. But there's the immediate implication that some people's grief is seen as less than normal people's grief because it's "weird," when the truth is, if you don't have a huge social circle to start, losing anyone hurts that much more. I also remember hearing "That's a weird thing to be upset about" over far smaller things than the death of someone I care about. Sometimes it was followed up by "But I didn't call you weird!" So the title gives that feeling of being accused, or being lesser. Which is pretty upsetting, when normal grief is filled with cliches and so forth. It also says: sure, you can grieve, but don't be TOO weird about it, okay?

It brings back memories of snarky teens whispering behind others' back. Does the weird person know we're whispering? If not, it's weird to be that clueless about themselves and others. If so, it's weird not to do anything to, you know, become more acceptable. In this game, the weird grief certainly comes off as much more acceptable than normal grief. The people who call themselves normal seem not to realize that the grief they call weird deserves to be more because, well, it's harder to find friends if you're not normal, so losing a friend hurts more. I hope this isn't too harsh on normal people, but I think it accurately describes too many people who, sadly, lump the world into Normals and Weirds. Perhaps they even have weird friends! But not that weird.

It also brings back memories of a Life in Hell cartoon. If the name doesn't ring a bell, the author, Matt Groening, went on to make the bold move of creating a prime-time cartoon show called The Simpsons and later Futurama. One of the characters was Binky. And he had scary thoughts, like, “if people start laughing at your funeral, do you have to sit there and take it?” And the pastor in the strip said “Well, he lived an interesting and useful life, sort of.” And WG brought that back again. It was easy to picture the deceased family's liking him "despite all that" and his friends actually, well, knowing him better.

As for knowing him? Well, someone named Mike dies at 33. We aren't told why until The Dead Account. Was it COVID? A rare disease? A hate crime? Drugs? (Note: this felt like it would've been the easy choice, with maybe some discussion of the "normies" saying "well he should've known better, why didn't you stop him" and his friends protesting.) But the author avoided any details, and I think that's effective, because at the end, we realize it doesn't matter, and Mike, like anyone, doesn't deserve to have people pry if they didn't care enough during his lifetime. Or, well, his family take backhanded potshots at him and his friends at his funeral.

And while my lifestyle isn't as different from the norm as the characters in WG, I certainly have envisioned a funeral full of backhanded compliments from my relatives. This flared up with the Coronavirus. If I died and my family looked at what I did, what would I have to show? I realized I'd never shared any of my text adventures with them. I think it'd get in the way. Perhaps they'd give condescending approval, but God forbid I sit down to explain it to them, or they take time to figure it out. And I realized people who listed family members as testers or inspiration … well, I couldn't relate. I realized there were people in the community I was closer to than I was to my immediate family, and I wasn't that close to them. But I still got a lot from them. And yes, I was at a funeral where Perfectly Normal people behaved Perfectly Normal and the result was shocking. At least the people involved (including the pastor) waited until the funeral was over to agree: yeah, that eulogy was BS!

And for Mike, that seems like the best possible case, which would be sad indeed. I'm also struck by how Mike's family may say “OMG we loved Mike” but on the other hand, they don't want Mike's inner circle to be able to say the same thing.

I got something different out of it than most people on the discussion board topic that flared up. I'd rather not have sex scenes in games I play, but it seemed appropriate here. The people need to do what they can to move on, and they don't have to worry about things like "what would your family say?" Perhaps they won't do so very well at first, or they're not sure what to do, but they deserve to try. And I know I've had ways of dealing with loss that worked, and people who nitpicked them, well, they showed who they were.

WG was cathartic for me. I recalled many other things, like the sort of awful no-fun fantasies of people I disliked, people I should've liked on paper, people I hadn't seen in a long time, showing up to my funeral and remembering the worst parts. With time I've been able to mix some humor in this, and it's because of positive life experiences and reading stuff like WG that reminds me that my fears are ... well, normal, no matter what my Overall Weird Quotient may be. I remembered reading on Facebook that a middle-school classmate I learned about on Facebook had died, and how that compared to having no grief over a teacher I disliked, one I should've liked on paper, who died and that was a different sort of weird grief, only it wasn't weird at all, and in fact it helped me move on.

I took an hour to reflect after Weird Grief, and I was able to bend some bad things--people laughing at me, fearing people laughing at me--not weird grief, but potentially weird regret and weird fears--into something funny. No, Weird Grief isn't intended to be funny, but it helped me find humor, and to me, that's more effective than straight-out comedy.

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Plane Walker, by Jack Comfort

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Several parts come off flat, November 22, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

I played Plane Walker through with a walkthrough during IFComp. It was pretty wild and confusing, and yet, I thought there was something there. I hoped there was. Perhaps without the walkthrough I would've gone nuclear. But I'm glad it's there. Some people may be purists and say a walkthrough doesn't count. I like it as evidence the author tried to figure out and explain what was going on to people who might miss it. Unfortunately, the walkthrough is a bit plain (heh,) but after two playthroughs I had a better idea of what was going on. Perhaps I have a sympathy for games with weak blurbs and walkthroughs because I may rely on walkthroughs, myself. But the walkthrough was there, and it evidenced some level of rigor, and I think I saw that rigor the second time through. It actually leads you in the wrong direction, and when I discovered the right thing to do, I felt smart.

The table is set for so much more. The game name is clever, given the plot. You move from walking about a plane to (sort of) walking about, well, the plane of complex numbers. This gives very strong _A Beauty Cold and Austere vibes_. That was a big-idea general game that very effectively looked at stuff like basic graph theory and gave enough space for possible sub-games or spinoffs that discussed trickier mathematical ideas in detail. For instance, you could discover how to derive the Quadratic or Cubic formula. Or you could have a proof of sorts of the Checkerboard problem (I wrote an EctoComp game called The Checkered Haunting which tried to,) or maybe a look at induction or strong induction.

And I felt sort of bad when Mike Spivey asked me “what more would you do with this/what would you add?” after I sent a transcript. My answer was: yes, this is out of the scope of ABCA, but I'd do stuff like show how the quadratic or cubic formulas got derived. I don't know how, because it's hard, but if it could be done, that'd be cool. This sort of thing in a blurb might leave people running and screaming for the next game, but it would definitely attract certain people or make them realize okay, I need to buckle down here. IIRC, Mike responded "yeah, that'd be neat, but it'd be hard." But I think there is a lot you can do with probability or whatever that'd go beyond a story problem, and so forth. And ABCA covers a lot of basics and opens the door to much more that could be done.

But it's all a bit dry with Plane Walker. And the first impression it gives when you have to guess the verb a bit to short out a passcode keypad is unfortunate, though things pick up from there. You find a textbook, read it, enter a chalkboard, and flip to the right page to move forward in the game. There are a few aliens around telling you you have a mission, but I was unable to read between the lines. There's a dungeon area where you clean off a pickaxe and break down walls. There are also some classroom doors which the game says you should be able to enter, but you can't. Eventually you make yourself two-dimensional, which is kind of cool. (This spoils nothing, as the way to go 2-D is unusual.)

Unfortunately, though, Plane Walker seems to rely too much on the “intuition” part of “nothing but amnesia and intuition,” and I was left confused. Since the walkthrough was just commands, I wasn't even sure what my mission was. I floated around a lecture hall and read textbooks. This all should have had a more explicit, point but it didn't. I had a few moments where things seemed pretty neat, though in one case, I completely misunderstood what was going on in a puzzle. I thought you had to tie a rope around yourself to fetch a key around a bend, but instead, you got the 2-D puzzle above. On reflection, I can't remember why the rope was necessary.

Still, there are neat harmless trippy bits as well as good cluing of what doors will be available later in the game, as you wander the university hallway. Which is nice--the names are a bit drab (e.g. East Hallway) though the game is not too intimidating.

Every year IFComp throws out a game or two where I'd love to sit down and say "Oh, THAT'S what they meant to do!" But sadly they never get updated. With Plane Walker, which is indeed such a game, I'm glad I took the time to write out a map for others to look at, so I could at least figure out some of it. This is such a game, and unfortunately, having some math background left me unable to understand or appreciate what the author was getting at. I was waiting for it to work, and even a walkthrough annotation would probably give me a few real a-ha moments. But, in contrast to Codex Sadistica and some heavy metal terms I knew nothing about but was able to follow, this gave me imaginary numbers and I wasn't able to.

Looking at others' reviews, I am not alone. Some of the puzzles felt like some of my first-draft games before I realized, oops, I forgot to make this-or-that clear, or I really should throw in another example, and no, it won't spoil any puzzles. Plane Walker certainly arouses my imagination and curiosity more than easy-reading cliches, and I applaud the author having vision, even if they didn't communicate it well. There seemed to be jokes just waiting to work, but they never did. I'd love to see that vision fully formed. I'm glad I took a more careful look to see some of it, but a lot is too far buried. That said, playing it with a walkthrough was a positive and harmlessly trippy experience.

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The Belinsky Conundrum, by Sam Ursu

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Fun adventure if you choose the right path midway through, November 22, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

The Belinsky Conundrum is a Facebook Messenger app about a top-secret mission to take out a spy who's managed to avoid his kids being chipped. It's a compelling premise, and it's extra-cool that it's on a new platform, and you can do this sort of thing on Facebook, and you (presumably) won't be suckered into in-app purchases along the way to get a better ending. Which gives it a leg up on a lot of games on Facebook.

But unfortunately there wasn't enough of a conundrum to really sink my teeth into. The game follows a pattern of asking for 3 different options, some of which feel very small-talky indeed and maybe did not give all the variety I hoped for, even though they gave a laugh. Given the tone of responese, this would be okay for a comedic slice of life game, but it feels out of proportion in something more exciting–perhaps the author's strength is more with slice of life games. An example is below–I'm not sure of the differences, and perhaps it would be better to have no choice at all, or "nod impressively / stay still ". I think we have some latitude for false choices in choice-based games, but unfortunately here it seemed to contrast with the gravity of the situation. One early example is below:

(Spoiler - click to show)"The national security of the United States is at stake," says Admiral Houfy.

Sweet! / That's messed up / Oh my god


Still, I managed to put up with my boss's orders to succeed or else, and make it to Norway, where I bought a car and gun "off the grid," which was quite fun. Apparently I owned a wind farm, or could pretend to own one, to make the purchases plausible. The only real puzzle I saw was finding the name of the gun dealer, and I chose the most oddly spelled one, because it was foreign, and it worked. I felt satisfied, and I'd have liked more puzzles like that, regardless of how bad they'd kill you off it you messed up. I was also curious who it was that the government had tracking me to make sure I did my job. TBC brings it up on the NorAir flight I took. There are suspects that are so obvious they couldn't be the one and suspects that obviously could be the one.

TBC feels very high-stakes at first, but it seems the only chance to go wrong was at the end, where you had a choice to try a hit on Belinsky or not. I did not and was told to stand down shortly after. This is a point where being able to undo things would've been appreciated, as I was hoping to read about the moral implications or possibilities. But it took a bit too long to get there. That was the first time. Fortunately, TBC was short enough that it wasn't hard to play again. This time, I eyeballed the correct passenger (the old lady) and went to Iceland where I found an underground maze where I met an old contact. Then I burst into the Belinsky house. I had a long, winding adventure with Belinky, escaping both world and US governments as well as some philosophical discussions about safety vs control/surveillance. They were a bit didactic, but they helped me put things together. There was a dramatic end, and yet I still can't help feeling so many of the dialogues and choices were superfluous and missed out on a chance to develop the core story. There was probably more there than what came before, but people might miss it, so I'd like to at least have that for reference..

I think TBC buries the bulk of its good stuff, and not just because it was on Facebook Messenger instead of a more traditional, accessible and lightweight format. But there is good stuff. I mean, I don't want to find out all the surprises at once, but it seemed a bit back-loaded and never quite built to the climax it should or could have had, because after being hit up front with many dialogue choices that didn't seem to matter, I was never really able to get back into a strategic frame of mind. Though without too many spoilers, I think it's satisfying Roosk gets pegged as dislikable in the end. And the chase where you actually try to rescue Belinsky was, for me, probably the best part of the game. So you probably won't want to miss it.

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4x4 Galaxy, by Agnieszka Trzaska

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
The sequel is even better, but you'll want to play both, November 21, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

I played Ultima IV first in the series, and the result was, I never quite appreciated Ultima III as much as others did. Of course I should've been glad things just got better. And I thought of that when playing 4x4 Galaxy after 4x4 Archipelago. 4x4A is, as you'd expect, the better game. It's got more things to do. But 4x4G was a lot of fun once 4x4A got too familiar, and it was neat to see how things had grown, or where a certain concept in 4x4A started. So many things were familiar from 4x4A to 4x4G, though they were simpler. Which is okay. You expect franchises to get more complex with time, and 4x4 did.

4x4G, as you'd expect, features you as an adventurer shuttling between 16 different planets as you complete one of three random quests: piecing together a map, making an engine to rescue a friend from slavers in an asteroid belt, or freeing your home planet (one of the 16) from a tyrant who serves as the final boss fight. The outer four are the most dangerous for space travel. The other edge planets are moderately tough, and the inner ones are safe. The main way to improvement here is not shooting enemy ships (experience points are not tracked here, though you may find valuables in the wreckage) but trading. While some worlds only have mines or an enemy base, others sell or buy common or exotic goods. By bouncing back and forth, you can make a quick profit. Of course, there are problems. Random adventures during space travel may result in losing goods (your hatch flew open) or just being attacked by pirates, who are more powerful than you at first. Fleeing feels wimpy, but it's okay, even if you're the stronger.

But eventually you get enough money for better ship armor or weapons for interstellar travel, or bionics to increase your own hit points. These are one- or two-time boosts maximum, which, along with 4x4G boasting only a knife and laser pistol as weapons, gives you a hint that grinding is not the way to go. If you're feeling very lucky, or you use save slots judiciously, you can maybe sneak in some trading of illicit goods. We're never told what they are, but I think it's more fun and family-friendly that way to keep it ambiguous. And it adds excitement, too: once it's in your cargo, you risk getting get caught with contraband as well, where you have several ways to try to deal with customs officers.

That is the only way to lose credits, the game's currency. It's pretty generous in helping a player who's been knocked down. Adventures in the wilderness of planets you land on give net gains on average, so even if you wind up broke, you're not stuck. And you can still take advantage of this when you're well-off. So it's not hard to just lawnmower 4x4G, once you reach a critical mass. It's possible just to buy your way to victories in critical fights with enough medkits (for your HP) or repair kits (for your ship's) since they're used instantaneously. You do wind up with a glut of credits very quickly. But I think that's a good design choice--the point is to show the randomly generated areas and quests, not to dump strategy on the player. Also, the beginning is tough, but I think it should be, because the proces of discovering what works and what doesn't is fun, and on replay, you may feel quite accomplished figuring how to start much more quickly. I did.

As in 4x4A, you don't just want to build up your credits and stats. There's also renown, which you get from returning artifacts instead of selling them at the black market, or from helping out other crafts in random adventures. Some of the big quests are guaranteed to give renown, but there are some random recurring adventures where you can farm it, and you can even get interviewed for more renown, though you need minimal renown to be famous enough. Renown eventually lets you into GalGeo, the Galatic Geographical Society, which gives one-time boosts you can't buy. From there you can start to really beat up the warships and such that seemed impossible at first. All this doesn't take very long, but there are some neat wrinkles. For instance, star crystals are a quasi-currency, and your instinct may be to sell them all. But for some quests, you need to trade star crystals for a unique item. So you can get stuck for a bit. Fortunately, random quests and fights that drop star crystals reappear, as do some incidents that help you farm renown, whereas 4x4A only lets you see them once. This means a distinct lack of urgency, but sometimes, that's a very good thing.

After a few plays through, I had a good idea of what shifted around in each play of 4x4G, and how. Unlike in 4x4A, everything gets reused, but of course "everything" encompasses a lot less. There's always a pirate, beast and alien base each, and the only question is if the map is forward/back or up/down/east/west. A fixed number of planets have mines, which have 2 different layouts. It's a very tidy game, and seeing all three quests is worthwhile. But it's a bit less replayable because the world isn't as big. So 4x4A's strategy is more complex, and there's just more to do on each island, but 4x4G is better if you have less time, and there's less nuisance over bad RNG causing you to wait on a random adventure you need for a quest. Also, the very nice autosave feature takes so much less time, because 4x4G, being smaller, demands less of Twine.

Still, whether you play 4x4G second or first, it's worth looking at both games. I liked seeing how the item selection, combat skills, and maps of mines and dungeons evolved from 4x4G to 4x4A, how there were just more and more interesting monsters and random adventures, and how certain concepts, such as finding tales from different planets/islands, got refined. I especially enjoyed seeing the in-game journal become so much more useful and informative, and the individual graphics for each island in 4x4A made it feel a lot less cold than the red, yellow and green O-shapes of 4x4G. That's not a knock on 4x4G. It clearly got the main things right and set the table for 4x4A to refine some already really good ideas, both technical and creative.

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What remains of me, by Jovial Ron

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Surreal "your apartment and neighborhood" game in an interesting engine, November 21, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

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.

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This Won't Make You Happy, by Mike Gillis

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
It did make me smile a bit., November 21, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

This Won't Make You Happy (shortened to THIS) is a short meta-humor game where your goal is explicitly to find a jewel of happiness. It shouldn't take long, either. The game explicitly admits at one point it was about learning to code, and I think we've all identified with just playing QuestyQuest or getting to that next level or whatever. And I certainly identify with COVID throwing me for a loop and wanting to try new stuff and not being very motivated. The choices are silly and maybe a bit reductive, and there's minor gross-out stuff, but they're never obscene.

And yet it only goes so far. Having seen a lot of games in the IF community, I've seen the basic puzzles people do to learn the technical parts of a language. It's new to them but not to those of us who have been programming. Towers of Hanoi, Wolf Goat Cabbage, truth tellers/liars, and so forth. It seems there are basic "unit" stories or tricks for programming more creative stuff. Fourth-wall humor, Do I Really Need to Keep Grinding, autobiographical ruminations, and, well, It Was All a Dream. They have more value, because although we've read them before (of course WINNING doesn't make you happy) we are more likely to get individual touches and treatments from the author. In this case, most of us know that getting a big fancy jewel won't make us happy. It's the journey. And here, the journey is nice, but there's not enough. I'd hear the jokes before, and they're not bad jokes, but they don't make for real individuality.

So what happens? You start off trapped in the Caves of Despair. You have some normal choices and some weird ones. Sometimes the normal ones fail, and you try the weird ones, and the game heckles you mildly. You find some gems and really have no choice but to take them, though you can sing a Gem Song if you want, and then there's a small green man, Grommo the Gremlin, who is in your way. You have no choice but to kill him, but after you do, you have choices of how to complain to the narrator. You do get to see the Gem of Happiness at the end, though first, you get to talk with the narrator about life and isolation from COVID and other disappointments. As for actually taking the gem? (Spoiler - click to show)You can't. There's just a loop. But you can quit the game.

Now I've seen these jokes in various forms. We know, abstractly, that "keep on questin' no matter what" is quite bad, whether it's a Candy Crush level that won't let you get 3 stars without really good luck or a lot of power-ups, or ... well, anything that gets your attention and then holds you in with sunk costs. So it's good THIS comes out against that sort of thing and provides humor. But nothing really memorable enough.

It did have a positive effect on me. The night before playing it, I was on chess.com last night just playing enough games to advance to the next league. You see, chess.com has leagues of 50 people and you get points for each win or draw. The top 10 (or 5 or 3 at higher levels) advance. There is no relegation. I was in the top 5 and managed to secure staying there, but I remembered how nervous I was that #6, whom I was ahead of by a factor of 1.33 or so, would catch me. But it didn't feel like enough! I was still looking over my shoulder. (I made it, of course. But it did call into question whether I should be playing chess games just to play chess games. I wound up deciding in favor of IFComp reviews, which was a good choice.)

One other thing: THIS's twine template may freeze up your browser. I admit I got rid of the timed text (a personal bugbear) with a few regular expressions. It seemed to get stuck some times, and the 15/20 second waits seemed indefinite. Replace (Spoiler - click to show)after:[0-9]+s with after:1s and t8n-time:[0-9]+s with t8n-time:1s.

This (puts on shades) made me happy. I got to see everything in the game a bit more quickly, and also I felt less helpless. And perhaps if THIS had explored these themes more, it would've soared.

In the authors' forum, someone compared the writing to Kingdom of Loathing, and once they mentioned it, it did remind me of that. I'm hesitant to recommend KoL because of what a timesink it was, even though it was terribly fun. THIS, but it does have that “first program” feel to it, and with more characters/obstacles like Grommo the goblin, we'd have something very cool. I think that's needed, because otherwise the main idea of "collecting gems is useless" is a bit trivial. In KoL's case, part of the fun is collecting worthless items like ghuol ears (not a typo) and batgut and putting them in a display case to be the person with the most batgut, and maybe even inflating their price in the process and having fun and not taking it seriously. That's hard to capture in a 15 minute game.

But THIS makes a start, and though if it didn't make me happy, it gave me a legitimate boost.

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You Couldn't Have Done That, by Ann Hugo

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Autism and helplessness, November 17, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2020

YCHDT's blurb spells things out pretty quickly. The title, however, is more fungible. And I wondered: there were so many ways to say it. Was the main character saying it to someone else? Were they hurt? Impressed? Was someone else saying it to them? Did the main character lash out unacceptably? Things seemed ugly any which way. I pictured a hugely dramatic resolution at the end. There was none, and I think YCHDT worked better without it.

Because as it turns out, there's another possibility, namely that (Spoiler - click to show)you don't feel able to do what you want to do, or what other people would have no problem doing, or what people expect of you, and people don't quite get why you can't.

This is built up through the story. It's your first day at a new job. You're given relatively remedial tasks (which you enjoy, and which some people might find weird you enjoy) and introduced to your coworkers. One is actually friendly, and one is surface-friendly, focused on "fixing you up," making you more "presentable," "exciting," etc. I've had this from people even though I'm not autistic (oh hi, gun nuts in my horrible old Boy Scout troop 2 years younger than me,) and there's no way to push back without seeming confrontational, and you suspect they just have more experience in a shouting match. They'll say "you need to ..." without asking what you'd ultimately like, or want. Perhaps they're just being oblivious, and it takes a lot more data to consign them to "seriously not worth listening to" territory. Of course there are things that let you blow someone off immediately, but bad actors don't have to be a genius to train themselves to avoid that. So they make themselves minimally tolerable and have something prepared if someone does lash out. We learn to deal with this as we grow older.

But it's hard to! We make a lot of bad guesses, whether or not we are autistic. And I can't speak scientifically whether autism means you start with more to learn, or it's harder to learn and retain what you learn. Just--being stuck in a situation where someone says "I was trying to help" and wasn't, or if they ask you an obvious question and you're too frozen to answer, maybe because you're worried they have a cruel follow-up, hurts. Maybe you realise there's a Hobson's Choice and it's tough to pick the less awful way. It doesn't have to happen often. But having it happen all the time must hurt terribly, whether or not people say "Gee, don't you learn?" whether it's due to actual learned helplessness or autism.

As someone who just didn't get the power games people played with dialogue and was conscious of that, this struck a nerve. But I was able to bounce back from this reading and some memories. I've had my share of people I had to back away from because their jokes are superficially friendly, or they start with self-deprecation to "justify" insulting someone later. Or they, being a bit narcissistic, expect constant brief verbal encouragement to continue their long rant.

And it's weird. The best response may be "oh" and look away. But it also may be the worst response. And the difference may be subtle gestures you're not aware of. I certainly felt, well, the narrator should be able to bounce back from the violations of personal space, etc., from their coworker. They deserve to. But they didn't. And this was all done with a lack of melodrama. It says a lot beyond autism to me, as it's about helplessness in general and not wanting to let people spoil your victories, big or small, that you should enjoy and be proud of.

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What the Bus?, by E. Joyce

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Weird public transport in real life: bad. In twine: good., November 16, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2020

In real life, we don't want our public transport to be exciting. We want it to be there and relatively on time. And in Chicago, it is. Just as in Boston, it's not perfect, but you can access arrival times and expected trip times on your phone. Train and bus routes intersect. You don't want to make too much contact with your fellow bus riders, except to ask if that book they're reading and you've heard about is any good. And so forth.

Yet what with COVID, I think I've had serious withdrawal. I never particularly enjoyed driving, especially in traffic. On the bus or train, there's time to sit and think of weird stuff or even look for something new on that route you've been down a hundred or even a thousand times before. Or there's that fear (or, if life's been particularly boring, hope) a three-transfer trip out to a suburb you can only locate on a map will get very, very weird indeed. There's that wonder, just where does bus route X go? I still enjoy seeing maps where buses with numbers over 300 sprawl to obscure suburbs. Though really, about the weirdest thing that ever happened to me was that a Pace bus out to Elk Grove had to pay a highway toll. This seemed like a violation of some economic principle or other.

What the Bus goes beyond that, in the safety of your own home--or maybe even if you are on the bus! It's about as adventurous and odd as public transport can be. It has good smattering of random text about what's going on around you, or where your GPS thinks you are (Las Vegas, Bhutan, and so forth.) And it doesn't start weird, but it gets that way once your original public transport is delayed. You start off with choices between the Yellow and Purple lines and wind up, if you're careful, on the Orange Vanilla, Chartreuse or Calico lines. The background changes to your train's color. Two choices have identical text but give radically different endings--of which there are only ten, but given how some game branches cycle, you need to make a few maps, even with that nice undo feature.

I suspect that a huge chunk of this game is natural to residents of Boston. And yet, it feels very weird to me. The Red, Yellow, Orange Blue and Purple lines all exist in Chicago, but not like that! The buses have different numbers. So it would be odd and mysterious even written straight-up. But it's a good weird. I've certainly had nightmares about public transport not going where it should, and this brought them back with a smile.

What the Bus offers nothing in the way of profound philosophy, but it doesn't have to. It's quite accessible, since it has UNDO commands, so you can knock off the ten endings pretty quickly. There is no grand reveal, just the satisfaction of seeing it all. I have to admit, 24 hours after playing it, I don't remember the endings--most of my time after playing was spent in memories of wrong buses taken, times I'd walked to a connecting bus to save time, or just barely managing to sneak in my second free transfer two hours after paying my first fare on a two-hour circular trip.

All this is fun for me, and I miss it, but it's probably not so exciting to make a game of. I was surprised What the Bus brought so much uncertainty and wonder back, especially of times before I got used to my now-favorite bus route as it went over a highway or past some once-mysterious business I finally Googled one day. I have to admit, I don't remember the endings all that well. But that just means the confusion will be fresh and wonderful if I ever pull it up again. It's the sort of game that fills a niche if not a huge need, and you're glad someone did it and did it well. I think anyone will enjoy the humor, but those who appreciate public transport despite all its faults will like it a bit more.

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Death Plays Battleship, by Nerd Date Night

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Trippy in retrospect, November 10, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: EctoComp 2020, EctoComp

It's good news when an EctoComp entry is replayable. It's also quite good when I have to replay it, and I know it'll be worth it. But for this game, I didn't want to replay it until I considered the possibilities. Perhaps I'm just the right audience for it.

But it's just a simple game of Battleship. A 3x1 ship on a 4x4 board. For you and death. All for the right to avoid damnation. I won my first time. Maybe I just want to keep my perfect record.

However, I'm currently entertaining the notion that the game doesn't pick things at random. That it only seems to. After all, it gives you four guesses to start, and there's no guarantee one of them hits. (In fact, there never is, with four guesses. You need five: C1, D2, A2, B3, C4, for instance.) And Death hit me the move after I hit him. Then, in a stroke of luck, I guessed wrong, but so did Death. This isn't totally improbable, but there's enough linked that the story could go like so:

Death taunts a mere mortal, asking them why they deserve to avoid eternal damnation. The mortal's actually been a pretty good person, but Death doesn't want to make it easy. Death mocks them: "don't ask wise questions about how I know what you're thinking and how you might cheat." But Death has already made up its mind, in the person's favor. It's just part of the ritual. (Note: you have opportunities to be a smartaleck. Maybe this fixes you for a bad end. That'd be cool.)

As someone who has spent far too much time poking at advanced battleship strategies, such as they are, I didn't expect an oversimplified game of battleship to be so thought-provoking, but I'm glad it was.

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The Fable of the Kabu, by Jorge García Colmenar

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Dreaming in color -- well, only 2 at a time, November 10, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: EctoComp 2021, EctoComp

From the screenshots, FoK seemed like this was one of those RPGs you could just lawnmower through. Which was a change of pace. And indeed, lawnmowering through gets you to an ending quickly enough. You start as an egg, and you become more fully developed into a Kabu (nightmare creature,) you learn (or think you learn) about your world. But there isn't anything like stats or inventory or combat. You simply have a few screens--some with areas you can't get to right away--and NPCs to interact with. There's a mole, and there's a child killing ants, and there are even other Kabu, who don't seem to like you.

And with all this is a small story with several different possibilities. You can go full nightmare, where you wind up killing an entire city in a surprisingly quiet manner, or you can try to learn what is happening and why you are who you are. I wasn't able to get a happy ending, though I think there must be one. I also originally assumed you couldn't get to a small spring. So I had a story in my mind about how your life is really depressing and there is no way out, until I managed to make my way to the spring. Life still wasn't perfect for the poor Kabu.

And perhaps the game isn't. You interact with NPCs by running into them, and I killed a few without meaning to, before I'd officially turned bloodthirsty. So this left me confused. But it's hardly fatal, and I didn't mind translating the Spanish text that crept in the game either.

It's neat that something like this could exist. Even if I'm not 100% sure what to make of it, or if my ideas are even reasonable, it'll stay with me. It's all a bit vague, but it's supposed to be, being a fable and all. Small things like how you hatch or discovering your mother or the color change as the story progresses work for a memorable experience, and the one-bit graphics work well, too. I even enjoyed the trial and error to see what I could walk over, as it was mostly intuitive, and often when I couldn't run through something, I was able to figure what it was. I'd always had vague ideas of blending a top-down RPG-style game with text, and it's neat to see how doable it can be, and that it's done pretty well. And I hope it's done again.

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Deep in the Spooky Scary Woods, by Healy

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Quick silly fun. Maybe a bit too quick., November 9, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: EctoComp 2021, EctoComp

If you are going to make a last-day entry, EctoComp is the competition to do things in, and Twine definitely helps. Healy is an EctoComp specialist who provided cheery scary stuff in 2014 and 2019 and this year's entry follows up on that.

The basic plot is that you quickly meet a witch in the woods and then maybe Dracula. It felt like the game would branch out a lot more than it actually did, because I made the "right" choice to move forward, so I had my pencil ready to map the branches out. But then later I enjoyed how it gave the option flipped back between 2 weaker options, one of which is lampshaded as "cry." I was also amused by "text a friend" because I'll never forget a tweet that said "Boy, a lot of horror movies pre-1995 could've been solved by having cell phones!" But you are still scared.

And the endings are appreciably silly. So I got a few laughs. But my fears it might overstay its welcome (the title lampshades it's a bit overdone) turned out to be 180-degrees wrong. I wanted a little more. I hope Healy uses all four hours next year. I appreciate having games like this to recover from the darker ones, whether they're in EctoComp or even IFComp.

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Haunted Mustache Pizza Delivery, by Joey Acrimonious

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Pictures of pizza. Lots of them., November 9, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: EctoComp, EctoComp 2021

Haunted Mustache Pizza Delivery is a heck of a title, that's for sure. It reminded me of an article I read long ago, about a college football head coaching change. There was a picture of a mustache in a bowl of oatmeal. It was hilarious (no, really) because the old head coach had a cool mustache. The defensive coordinator had a cool mustache. He was considered the frontrunner, but the new head coach wound up having a cool mustache, too.

HMPD doesn't quite reach these heights, but it gave me a laugh or two. You have to stay late for one more delivery, and the chef is gone. So it's up to you to make the pizza.

Your mustache twitches as you put certain ingredients on. And there are a lot. I naively decided to put them all on, and maybe I should've seen the ending coming, given the clues. I replayed several times, and I managed to get several different pictures of pizza, from "boring school cheese pizza" to "looks more like a detailed woodcarving" to "full on vegetable platter." So I think what you put on affects what sort of picture you get, and I was curious, but I don't know enough about food to find everything.

I didn't find a truly winning ending. Perhaps there is one combination that works. But I enjoyed it enough. Yes, the content-warning bits Weren't My Thing, but they weren't tasteless. So it seemed nicely executed. Though my technical side wonders if it might not be better in Twine.

I'd like to see a post-comp release that tracks or clues the endings. I have a feeling I missed something, and while I Got It overall, it feels like the author may've had more they wanted to pack in. But it more than does the job as a short EctoComp piece.

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The River of Blood, by Dee Cooke

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Neat retro feel and appropriately scary/fun for EctoComp, November 9, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: EctoComp 2021, EctoComp

I always enjoy seeing more Adventuron games, because it's a good new system, and the Adventuron community is serious about producing creative games with neat graphics. The River of Blood is no exception. It's well-suited for a 4-hour competition and well planned out, well beyond being able to type "U" for upstream and "D" for downstream.

You are dead and traveling through the afterlife, or something close to it, in a river of blood you can't escape. Items float by. You can go downstream to pick them up. There's also a Grim Reaper who approaches periodically--mostly for dramatic effect. It sometimes randomly killed me, but I was able to undo it.

If you do things in time, you find who you are. But if not, you die for-real. The time limit seems fair. There's one neat clue that changes slowly as time goes by. The first time, I missed a clue I should have seen. And when I won a second time, I realized I hadn't seen everything. Examining objects can provide even more clues as to who you are--though some must be examined after doing things.

I really like the retro feel of this game--the low-res graphics are quite effective, and detailed pictures would feel like overkill--and the red/white/black motif feels quite nice and economical, too. The sound also feels comfortable and old-school. It's quickly replayable so you can see everything and made up of low-pressure Halloween thrills.

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Wabewalker, by Ben Sisk

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Live as 3 different people until you get it right, November 3, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

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.

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Cygnet Committee, by P.B. Parjeter

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Custom engine uses sound-based puzzles to good effect, November 2, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IFComp 2021

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.

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The Job, by Fredrik Ramsberg

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Don't clockwatch on this job!, September 27, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: PunyJam 2021

(NOTE: this is a review of the comp version of the game.)

The author redacted themselves from the competition they created, but The Job wound up making a decent account of itself, as I saw it. You are tasked with bringing back a necklace. It's hidden in a relatively cramped pub. But there's something special about the pub and how you escape it, which makes sense in retrospect--I missed a few good tries that would've clued it, because I recognized the riff on the classic puzzle this game had, and I started bulldozing the solution.

The author has made a few post-comp tweaks, but I'd also suggest (as of release 3) that they give some hint it's a timed puzzle and some idea of how long it might take until that timer expires. That, and a verb to shuffle similar sorts of items ("replace x with y") instead of "get x. (possibly) drop x (due to inventory limits). put y on z." There's a bit too much juggling, though fortunately, the solution isn't randomized. The inventory limits are again slightly confounding--perhaps the game could say "you can't carry too much more" or "your load is way too heavy" or even "you'd have to drop (weight X) to carry that."

These are a lot of quibbles but they were of the "interesting to reflect on" variety. I think they'd help the game get close to how fun the author wants the experience to be. As even with back and forth trips, the game gives enough time, you shouldn't have to save paranoically.

The following observations are big-picture to avoid spoilers. You'll find why the game is timed if you take too long. My first time through, I almost avoided this, so from this one data point, the game seems well-balanced.

It's straightforward but not bare-bones. In the first version, I felt the end puzzle was stronger and more natural and more rewarding than the lead-up.

The Job isn't a deliberate brain-breaker and doesn't need to be. It's a nice enough challenge where nothing's unclear. You may need a knowledge of standard Inform verbs to remove one blocking piece of scenery expeditiously, but I think it's not an obscure action.

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Somewhere, Somewhen, by Jim MacBrayne

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
YMMV, but I got mileage, August 3, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Seeing this game place second-to-last in ParserComp was the motivation I needed to write a review. I rather liked it, and yet I can't blame those that didn't.

It certainly has faults, and I think many people, when looking for ways to separate games, may often rely on those faults. Or the faults may be magnified because other things show serious competence: the homebrew parser works. The whole picture fits, once you get past a certain point. The author allows shortcuts with F-keys, which I think is the sort of innovation ParserComp hoped to provoke.

Perhaps the title was a bit too bland (first impressions are important) and that, coupled with a lot of common sorts of fantasy items, let some players' minds wander.

That's not to say that I can pinpoint other entries that deserve to be below this. There's always going to be an odd man out, but compared to, say, the bottom few entries in IFComp for the first 15 years, this is light years ahead. It just feels like the author wasn't fully able to explore or communicate their vision. And I think, to a certain extent, the polish on the technical side outstripped the more subjective stuff. For instance, at the beginning, I fumbled around for a few moves but then began reading what I was supposed to. I got a message saying "You may wish to read <clues I was in the process of reading>." Which is technically correct, but a bit tone-deaf. These are the sorts of first-effort mistakes that grow far less prevalent in the future.

And some of the puzzles probably require too much of a leap without a walkthrough--but then again, I am the sort of judge who gives mulligans for too-tricky puzzles if a walkthrough is handy and I could see myself making a similar oversight. This may be a recommendation for some, but it may be discouragement for others. I suppose it depends on the imperfections you're willing to tolerate.

SS is certainly inviting enough, if a bit generic. Some parts feel overwritten, and some objects get lost in description. Yet I felt it filled enough holes I didn't know were there that it's worth the time to revisit. I'll probably need a walkthrough, along with maps. But it feels like the sort of game I'd want to replay to get ready to judge the next ParserComp.

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Djinn on the Rocks, by Joshua Wilson

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Never crashes ashore, May 31, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Djinn on the Rocks (DotR) would be worth playing for the mechanic alone, and since it gets that and more right, it's well worth a play. I'm not surprised it was rated almost the same as Captain Cutter's Treasure (CCT) in the comp, as there's a lot to enjoy from both games. I find it that much more special that the two top games (by a good margin) were so different in tone and goals.

DotR simply lets you swap the locations of similar things. But they must be very similar. So you can, for instance, swap your location with the location of your annoying owner James, who won't leave you alone until you've made them rich. Things are divided by size, material (vegetable/animal/mineral) and composition, which is trickier to explain. But they must be an exact match. There's no penalty for SWAPping the wrong things, and in fact the game explains why, so trial and error goes smoothly.

These mechanics are good, but perhaps what really offers creativity is how the game notes your karma can go from -100 to +100. So you quickly see you have the choice to be mean or nice. And you have the choice to change your owner James for the better or worse. This means that during some play-throughs, some NPCs and objects may be useless. But they are still entertaining to deal with. The puppy in particular--animal cruelty is no laughing matter, but you can be heartless indeed to it, in an overdramatic "nobody could be that mean" sort of way.

So DotR has a lot of good, original laughs and a solid basic idea. It's quite worth a play. It balances CCT, the game that just edged it out, nicely: DotR has cool ideas and lets you be creative, and CCT has more of a story to unravel. It's very neat that two games that had to follow the jam's rules (start in a broom closet with a specific description) could branch so drastically and both work so well. It's the sort of thing that encourages me to be more creative.

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Captain Cutter's Treasure, by Garry Francis

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Return treasure, rescue girl, and ... do better next time, if you want, May 31, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Captain Cutter's Treasure (CCT) is an impressive, small game. A pirate's daughter has been kidnapped. The ransom is some hidden treasure. You have to find and return it. There's a map to put together, and ... a bit more. But not too much.

The game has a respectable dialogue system that helps you flesh out as much of the story as you want to. There's even a very small puzzle that crosses genres into (Spoiler - click to show)Sokoban, and while you can put the game into an unwinnable state this way, it's relatively clear what to do without feeling dumb and obvious. I was more baffled with how to open a locked door, though when I thought through it, I realized I missed a few clues.

The game has three possible endings that I counted, and since doing the obvious right thing gets the "only okay" ending, there's some interesting meta/detective work. I think I got lucky (Spoiler - click to show)distracting Barnaby when he was on watch--I understood what to do but didn't have as good an idea of the ship's map as I did of the warehouse. Maybe it was just dealing with fore and aft. But it was pleasing to figure out what should generally happen.

This was a really good experience, well-organized and without a lot of red herrings. I'm not surprised

There are some issues of having to disambiguate more than you should need to for the parser, but I think that's more a function of people getting comfortable with programming PunyInform than any serious shortcomings. Besides, there's always the up-arrow on Frotz. So I think this is worth fighting through, and knowing this in advance will hopefully ensure that if you play CCT, you'll be able to see all CCT has to offer.

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Pub Adventure!, by Robin & Tom Edwards

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Mix drinks, satisfy ghost, May 26, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

In Pub Adventure, a ghost tasks you with making them a drink (a zombie, of course.) There aren't a lot of puzzles, and I was fortunate enough to avoid the guess-the-verb problems other peopl found (in fact I was glad there was no final verb to guess once you got the ingredients,) so I got through quickly. If you just explore and pick everything up, you should make it through without much trouble. For instance, two items you need for the drink are more or less sitting around in adjacent rooms.

The note and knife from PunyJam's required first room make things pretty straightforward, though I in fact was amused by the additional challenge of deciphering the torn note(Spoiler - click to show) if you didn't take the knife first. The game also has two bathrooms, and it doesn't feel like overkill.

I was a bit disappointed you couldn't (Spoiler - click to show)EAT OR DRINK any of the ingredients -- that was certainly the sort of thing the authors could find a funny response for. I suspect they will, if they ever write a bigger game.

Unless I overlooked something, this is the only PunyJam game where you actually have to mix a drink in a pub. I suspected there'd be more.

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Buccaneer's Cache, by Wilfried Elmenreich

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A bit too cryptic as-is, May 26, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

It was interesting to track which games in PunyJam gave credit to which old-school games and tropes, and this game along with Arthur's Day Out paid homage to Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And I always like to see that.

I think the other reviews touched on the main bottlenecks for this game, namely some guess-the-verb and noun issues that made what the author intended to be simple fun into something trickier. The game even gets in a potentially unwinnable state if you do not (Spoiler - click to show)get the knife from the closet before leaving the first time. I got a bit stuck thinking I had to (Spoiler - click to show)guess the right name to tell the beast, but there is none. And one piece of scenery you need to leave a seeming one-way dead-end is very obscured.

But for all this concern, there are good moments. There are alternate endings based on how many geocaches you find, and the game allows you to recoup and revisit if you miss (Spoiler - click to show)the first geocaching in the succession of one-way passages. This sort of thing shows obvious care and willingness to forgive the player for not seeing the right way through, and I suspect the author will know better where to direct care for their second effort.

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Arthur's Day Out, by Jason Oakley

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A respectable first effort, May 24, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: PunyJam 2021

Arthur's Day Out isn't the first game to give a tip of the cap to Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's got a bit more humor than average, which is nice, because sometimes it makes a few beginner mistakes. Mistakes worth fixing in a post-comp touch-up, for sure.

You play as Arthur, and quickly you find a dressing gown with analgesic. There's a computer password to unlock, a safe to open and a weird cave at the end. None of the puzzles are too hard, but you do have to remember to (Spoiler - click to show)search instead of look and also TAKE items that appear. That's a bit of busy work, but fortunately the game is only 15 rooms. It still feels a bit sparse for all that, but it's small enough I could keep the map in my head.

It's possible to short-circuit a lot of the puzzles with saving and restoring in the final room, and on replay, you can probably ignore the notes that give you clues. And if the puzzles are a bit random, they require no great unfair leaps. And the homages to H2G2 are nice.

The puzzles are the sort where you saw exactly what people meant to do once they're solved, but on the other hand, there's still a bit of needless fighting with the parser. While it placed 7th of 8 in PunyJam 1, it doesn't really feel like a bottom-feeder. That probably speaks to some talent on the developer's part as well as perhaps the PunyInform community (especially on discord) helping each other out. to do their best.

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Pub Hubbub, by Christopher Drum

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Scrub, Bub, Scrub!, May 4, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: PunyJam 2021

With a title like Pub Hubbub, you'd expect a few cheap jokes, and they're the good sort of cheap, the ones that give good return for relatively little investment. The game may not be super-ambitious, but it's a well-organized first effort with enough humor to keep you going through any frustrations you might have with the parser or with the time limitation. An ominous note saying your boss, John, owes $2500 "or else" adds to the plot.

You start in a broom closet, as with every PunyJam entry, and have four pub-cleaning tasks to complete in two hours of game time, or 120 moves. And while standard parser peeves (some rejected commands cost you a move), I was actually able to figure what to do even without logging on to my boss John's computer. The execution required some parser-wrangling, and in fact my first time through I just missed completing everything. Fortunately, nothing drastic happened, and the drudge work makes enough sense it was easy to replicate. Basic stuff you need to do so the pub isn't too nasty.

The game does a good job of brushing off parser mistakes with a joke. Nothing demeaning, but advice from older wiser relatives pops up if you forget something. The rejects for cleaning you don't need to do also amused me, and when I browsed the source code, I found other things I'd missed.

Nothing's too gross or out there, and in fact, there is one way to die that's lampshaded nicely. And there's a cigarette machine which contains more humor than cigarette machines generally do, and even a puzzle.

Given the game's general tone, I was able to figure roughly what the note was about before my boss John came back, and you may, too. But the details still made me laugh.

This is a good, promising first game. It has a few small bugs (or I think they're bugs and not my own incompetence) I'm glad to overlook, because the main stuff seems to work.

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Cragne Manor, by Ryan Veeder, Jenni Polodna et al.
Show other authorsAdam Whybray, Adri, Andrew Plotkin, Andy Holloway, Austin Auclair, Baldur Brückner, Ben Collins-Sussman, Bill Maya, Brian Rushton, Buster Hudson, Caleb Wilson, Carl Muckenhoupt, Chandler Groover, Chris Jones, Christopher Conley, Damon L. Wakes, Daniel Ravipinto, Daniel Stelzer, David Jose, David Petrocco, David Sturgis, Drew Mochak, Edward B, Emily Short, Erica Newman, Feneric, Finn Rosenløv, Gary Butterfield, Gavin Inglis, Greg Frost, Hanon Ondricek, Harkness Munt, Harrison Gerard, Ian Holmes, Ivan Roth, Jack Welch, Jacqueline Ashwell, James Eagle, Jason Dyer, Jason Lautzenheiser, Jason Love, Jeremy Freese, Joey Jones, Joshua Porch, Justin de Vesine, Justin Melvin, Katherine Morayati, Kenneth Pedersen, Lane Puetz, Llew Mason, Lucian Smith, Marco Innocenti, Marius Müller, Mark Britton, Mark Sample, Marshal Tenner Winter, Matt Schneider, Matt Weiner, Matthew Korson, Michael Fessler, Michael Gentry, Michael Hilborn, Michael Lin, Mike Spivey, Molly Ying, Monique Padelis, Naomi Hinchen, Nate Edwards, Petter Sjölund, Q Pheevr, Rachel Spitler, Reed Lockwood, Reina Adair, Riff Conner, Roberto Colnaghi, Rowan Lipkovits, Sam Kabo Ashwell, Scott Hammack, Sean M. Shore, Shin, Wade Clarke, Zach Hodgens, Zack Johnson

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
So I guess I should try Anchorhead some time, huh?, May 4, 2021
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

I'm too close to Cragne Manor to give it five stars officially. I tested a bunch of rooms and wound up emotionally invested in it. I wanted it to be good, and I enjoyed getting so many sneak previews of rooms in the game, but ... how the heck would they all fit together? Nevertheless, it seemed like a fun project to be a part of. I'm glad I was allowed in. This, from someone who will never, ever write a long-form horror game. (Insert "not intentionally" joke here at your leisure.)

However, I also put in so much energy just looking at the rooms that I put it aside. I needed a break. I worried my own expectations were too high. I had my own stuff to write, for better or worse. I'd wait for the walkthrough. The spoiler-heavy one. I'd hope it all fit together. Anyway, it was fun to try and figure which rooms I tested might be next to each other. A modification of the Birthday Paradox noted there would almost certainly be a few. But I'll skip the details, for those who find calculations more of a horror than, well, horror.

I figured it would take a while for the main authors to put stuff together, and it did. But once I started playing, I saw it wasn't just about lumping everything together. There were big-picture items you couldn't put in the individual rooms. The coffee cup seemed like a weird joke, until it became useful indeed, with a clever trigger so your character understood what the swirls meant. The trolley pass helps shrink the map with shortcuts and gives an amusing reject if you try to guess the colors of stations you haven't been to yet. Even the error messages seem helpful. And CM probably needs this, because you have all manner of similar but non-swappable books, keys, and pieces of paper. It'd be nightmarish, except that fortunately most items have only one use, and you get a backpack with all sorts of zippered compartments, helpfully labeled and organized into ... the sort of item types you find in the game. In short, the lack of technical horror helps you concentrate on the narrative horror.

This wasn't enough to get me hooked right away. I wrote my own stuff and laid low until there were a few walkthroughs, and the game's big enough, you'll probably need a few, to contrast ways through and sort out trivial typos. There's no one that's best. And discovering a room I tested was like finding an old friend, until it wasn't. There were some I forgot I tested, which was freaky, and some I didn't remember I did, which was freaky too. Some rooms seemed to pop up much too early, and some wound up much too late. For some of the early ones, I didn't have an item I received automatically during testing, because they had two separate small puzzles. So I felt, well, held back by some unknown force.

Eventually it all fit. I wound up worried writer X's room might be tricky, because I found something they wrote to be thorny. Or one person in the Discord (or was it Slack?) community mentioned their room was a bit bigger than they intended, and I worried it might be a mess. But in the end these fears were baseless, and everything pulled together. And the overall effect was: this game never feels it's done "right" or properly, but it's done very well. The jokes and references swing from very technical (hexadecimal humor) to more literary. The rooms swing from mostly scenery, with a few things to search and maybe just a door to open, to changing identities you make spiritual journeys through space and time, as one does in games featuring the supernatural. And if anything about this confuses you, the main authors drop in a device that lets you see room-specific CREDITS, if the room authors chose to include them. It dropped at the right moment for me, and it has a few amusing touches, especially for the longer blurbs.

And though horror isn't my thing, and I knew CM would be forgiving, I definitely had shivers of "oh dear I better save here." Or "I better not mess this up." With some rooms, this turned out not to be a problem due to strong design, or maybe you could immediately undo any deaths. But with certain rooms I didn't see, after the room creators submitted the game, the tension really built. With all the death and occult stuff piling up, I felt sure I had overlooked something, even with walkthroughs to follow. There are a few bring-them-all-together puzzles at the end, which are well beyond the rather neat library puzzle you see early on, where you need to return a bunch of creepy overdue books. This one in particular got me, because I still had a few library books to return to a suburban library. They waived the fines because of COVID, and I could keep them as long as I liked, but I just couldn't check any new ones. And when I returned a few materials just before trying to finish CM in earnest, there was a lot of social distancing and using a machine to check things in. So having CM overlap with real life like this was unexpected. It was probably going to happen in some way, with all the different ideas the room writers threw out there. But this was almost freakishly on the nose.

And just the game's sheer size worked in its favor to create an atmosphere I didn't expect. I've had smaller games just throw stuff at me and leave me exhausted, and I wound up worrying I'd missed something that could lock me out of a win here, even though I logically knew I shouldn't. The sheer number of key/door combos and articles to sort and remember, as well as rooms named similarly but not too similarly, left me disoriented but genuinely glad when I found shortcuts. For instance, some keys only open doors that save you time walking, but it relieves your helplessness a bit to actually see, yes, these two rooms that seem like they should link up, do.

I'm hard-put to find weaknesses of CM. It's definitely exhausting, and even with a walkthrough, the disambiguation gets to you after all. And perhaps sometimes it feels like inside baseball. But even so, I think every community should have a game like Cragne Manor. One where even sitting down with a walkthrough over the span of two late nights is a rewarding experience.

And I do feel I missed a little by attacking the walkthrough directly. There's certainly stuff I glossed over for efficiency's sake. While I took time to do some things wrong, just to see what horrors might pop up, there are bookmarks I placed in my mental map of CM for next time. There will also be stuff I weirdly forgot and weirdly remembered, and it will make for an entirely different experience than winning for the first time or testing the rooms.

I think any long-lasting creative community would be lucky to have an effort like Cragne Manor. It was a relief to see relative newcomers step up and to see former IFComp competitors show something I hadn't expected. It was exhausting, but by the end, I wished there was more.

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Reflections, by Tristin Grizel Dean

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Lots of light, little glare, April 28, 2021

The danger of relying on the old fairy tales is that you don't wind up saying or doing anything new, or you wind up getting too wild and rattling on. Reflections does neither. It gives you a cell phone to navigate certain puzzles, and it keeps familiar fantasy elements without cliche. All this makes it a good fit for the Text Adventure Literacy Jam as well as a good short game.

The goal is to find five different ways to see your reflection. And yes, the cell phone plays an integral part in a few of them. The best part is, you can't and don't have to call anyone, or find any numbers, or anything like that, though one common side-feature of cell phones is necessary to use and ewll-clued.

Positive interaction with animals is most important, and it's never twee. The puzzles and setting avoid the cliches of fantasy as well as gross anachronisms. They're also comfortable enough that you shouldn't struggle with the parser. And while Sentient Beings, the other game the author entered in this comp, is more ambitious and memorable, Reflections really takes the tutorial requirements for the jam and makes them come alive. So the author should be proud of writing either of these games, much less both.

This game also circumvents a potential pet peeve: you have some baking to do, which normally isn’t my thing, because bigger games may get into details too quickly. Here, it doesn’t feel forced on me. I’m the sort of person who is relieved when a recipe isn’t very complex, so the game’s courtesy was appreciated her, and I think in general any game that takes on something you aren't usually interested in and keeps you interested has clearly done something right.

Because the final point of the game is for (Spoiler - click to show)looking through the mirror in your house after traveling to a cave, it has a there-and-back feel to it. And just knowing what the final point should be certainly left me feeling competent when I needed to think about a puzzle near the end. Overall the game does a lot and avoids overdoing anything or trying too hard to get me to like it, which is a very real risk when writing fantasy stuff, so I do recommend it.

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Dungeons of Antur, by Ricardo Oyon Rodriguez

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
DoA is definitely not DOA, April 28, 2021

It's been done before, combining an RPG with a text adventure, but Dungeons of Antur (DoA) wound up performing much better than other text adventure and RPG hybrids I've played. Adventuron is partly responsible for that, but the author definitely did a lot of things right. Once I got out of "it's been done before" mode I realized this is the sort of game I'd have really enjoyed when I was 12, with or without the tutorial. A tutorial which notified me that tab-completion would help me cycle through all valid verbs. Since the competition explicitly wanted tutorials, and I had trouble guessing one verb (the author has since fixed this,) I was quite pleased to be able to approach future Adventuron games knowing verb-guessing would be less critical.

DoA's not huge--it might be exhausting that way. It has alternate endings. It has a few puzzles. It has strategy. It's randomized each time through. It even has an interesting NPC at the end. And I can't say DoA has a huge, overarching story. It's well put together, though, and it doesn't make mistakes. It's supposed to be sort of a demo for Adventuron's tutorials and a sequel, and I think it fits well.

As for specifics without spoilers: the puzzles and atmosphere are more the focus here. There's a grate that shuts down as soon as you enter the room, something to fish out from a well, and another grate that doesn't seem to have any mechanism at all. Skeletons contain messages in their bony hands. There's a secret room you should be able to find if you pay attention to the tutorial and another that requires a bit more trickery. Some weapons work better against certain monsters. You have armor and a few healing devices.

The graphics above the text give you a good view of the room or the enemy, along with your current stats. While a status line could display all this information, it wouldn't look as nice, and it'd feel a bit intrusive, too. DoA wasn't the only Literacy Jam game that gave me the feeling that, hey, I could make something attractive with lots of user-friendly features in Adventuron, but it managed to be a legitimate RPG and convinced me I could maybe stretch Adventuron's bounds to do my own thing.

As mentioned above, I do wish there were more games like DoA when I was a kid. But instead I figured I'd better be happy with what I got: Infocom games that blocked me at the first tough puzzle, but then again, if I could finish them too early, I'd have nothing left to play.

I used to be quite impressed with adults being able to make games hard, but as I've grown older, I'm more impressed with programmers who pace their games well, and DoA is an example. I got stuck often enough to feel challenge, but it wasn't frustrating. The battles are also well-balanced. It's possible you'll get wiped out, but saving and restoring is part of the general RPG procedure. In fact, there's one battle near the end where you almost certainly will get wiped out if you don't have a good think.

Finally, the writer deserves credit for doing a great job maintaining the game. They've made several bug fixes, small and large. And while anyone who writes a game in something other than their first language deserves approval for their courage, the author was quick to fix the sort of grammar nuisances that even native English speakers mess up. That bodes well for the potential sequel mentioned at the game's end.

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Sandcastle Master, by Chris Hay (a.k.a. Eldritch Renaissance Cake)

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Kid stuff, but not just for its own sake, April 27, 2021

With games featuring youth I'm always a bit worried that there will be nostalgia-pandering, but this game left my worries baseless. It doesn't try to be too cute, it deals with limits seamlessly, and it uses Adventuron's features quite well.

You're a kid who needs to decorate a sandcastle you helped your father build. Which doesn't sound too hard, and it isn't. Your father gives you a map of the beach to start, and you can’t go too far away from your parents. That helps keep the game small, so you don’t have to go wandering off anywhere. Which makes sense. Your parents wouldn't like that. Also, nicely, two of the map squares are inaccessible: some water is reserved for fishing, some for boats. This certainly brought back memories of places I couldn't go on the beach and made them a bit more fun.

The treasures aren’t terribly tricky to find, or valuable, but you would find them at the beach, and you would enjoy them as a kid, an the rainbow text sort of reenforces that--as an adult, I wondered if it was really necessary. It wasn't, but it made the game that much more enjoyable. But the game's not just simply about fun at the beach.

It also touches on things a kid doesn't know and won't realize until later. It winks at the older player. Not too sly for its own good, but a bit of thought fills in some things I might not have recognized when younger.

Once the father built the sandcastle, the kid may not realize parents need and want time to themselves. But there might not always be friends to hang with. So after helping his kid build a sandcastle, the father sends them out on a small fetching expedition to keep him entertained. There's another kid to sort of make friends with and a few older people to help along the way. Which keeps a day out fun for the kid.

Well, for the kid AND for me. And probably you, too. And you don't even have to pack up the car or suffer through traffic to enjoy it.

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Sentient Beings, by Tristin Grizel Dean

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Plot: Bot, Spot a Lot, April 25, 2021

Day and night are often just slipped into a game to provide realism, or give the player unofficial barriers that don't feel like puzzles. But in Sentient Beings, they offer up variety and puzzles that aren't out of place in a tutorial-style game.

And it's so well-executed that even when I saw what was going on and worried it didn't work, I wound up getting through without worrying about many of the technical aspects. I'm not the sort of person who'd generally gravitate to this game, but I liked it, and I hope that's not just a backhanded compliment.

You're this cute little robot who needs to pick up 24 specimens and bring them back to your rocket ship. Twelve are nocturnal, and twelve are diurnal. You need to do some preparations, such as measuring the temperature and light and air composition, before you can store anything in your rocket ship. While this may feel pedantic, it fits in well with the theme of the jam, which is to teach people about text adventures. And the science-y bits also provide for ways to explain verbs to you so you won't be guessing.

If I could change one thing, I might allow the player to return in their rocket ship after getting 22 or 23 of the samples, with a slightly less happy ending. If a casual player has, say, a 96% chance (this number was pulled out of nowhere) of finding any one specimen, there’s an 70% chance they’ll miss one (1-.96^24), so that could be frustrating for someone who doesn’t take disciplined notes right away. (Or maybe the game just put me in enough of a scientific mood to be OK with writing something like this.) However, even there, the game has a lovely walkthrough and you can guess which specimen you may've missed because (Spoiler - click to show)area 1's specimens go to the top left, area 6 to the bottom right, and so forth.

Lawnmowering through is a strategy that should work, though--there aren't TOO many things to observe, push, or search under, either at night or day--and the stuff that needs manipulation is pretty obvious. Plus, it's actually pretty scientific to go through room-by-room, in keeping with the whole science theme and taking careful notes and such.

But the game does a lot to make sure you don't miss details. It’s wonderful to be able to shut the robot off until the next day/night. So it makes the push-pull between wanting to explore more and wanting to nail down getting all the specimens in one area a little more interesting. My experience was worry the game might be a bit big, and once when I discovered its boundaries and found everything, I was a bit disappointed there wasn't more. I enjoyed the variety of terrains, and the different graphics in the day/night switches helped that.

The game is robust enough that I was able to work around a (now fixed) bug. I felt more focused the second time through, and I had a better plan, because the game allowed it. It's probably the most complex game of all the entries in terms of features as well, with an option to set robot humor and so forth.

This game also deserves serious credit for using custom verbs the best of any of the entrants. They're relatively intuitive, using some nouns that doubles was verb. MEASURE also requires an guess-the-noun puzzle, which I can assure you is a pleasant variation on the usual guess-the-verb. Given that tutorials were a focus of this comp, the author integrated the new verbs in very well, but only after you learned the standard ones.

Sentient Beings made me think without telling me it wanted me to think, which is always appreciated. I didn't realize it was well done until I looked back and thought about it.

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The Blue Lettuce, by Caleb Wilson

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
8 vegetables, but more pleasant than V-8, April 21, 2021

The Blue Lettuce was the only Inform game in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam, but it doesn't feel out of place, and its quality reflects the jam's general quality. It's a game about a groundhog who is looking forward to eating some magical blue lettuce. The puzzles are sensible, mainly about jumping around, and the prose is good. The way through is pretty clearly lit for those who just want to win, but I wasn't surprised there was more.

You'll probably miss a vegetable or two the first time through. The trickiest one for me to find on replay was (Spoiler - click to show)one that can actually vanish before you eat it. The puzzles are simple, in keeping with the jam's aims, and there's good variety in them. You'll never have to do anything radical.

I also like the responses to eating stuff you don't like, which rounds things out nicely. There's nothing crazy, but it all makes sense. Like I wouldn't expect the groundhog to enjoy grass, and they didn't. Between that and helpfully nudging you when you type in a wrong direction, It certainly goes along with the tutorial spirit of the competition. There's a crane as an NPC and a constant reference to the wizard who tends this area of odd vegetables, and that's nice to have, without forcing you into any tangled mythologies or complicated relationships.

Even though this game seems relatively simple, it had a few in-plain-sight points I didn’t see when I just plowed through the first time, because I wanted to get through all the comp games. I didn't mind missing things, and I enjoyed coming back later. Someone who sits down and diligently tries to enjoy the game should find everything and have fun in the process. It’s also neat that you can get the lettuce and not eat it right away to try everything, and the blue lettuce itself is a neat goal: obviously magical, but not too silly. It reminded me how I liked blue raspberry gelatin or blue ice cream or weird blue candy or bubble gum a lot as a kid, maybe because it was a slightly unnatural color, and I convinced myself it tasted exotic even if it didn’t really.

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Barry Basic and the Quick Escape, by Dee Cooke

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Basically Barry Enjoyable, April 21, 2021

This is a neat production where you must control three teens. One, Barry Basic, has snuck into an old-fashioned computer control room where he shouldn’t be, and he managed to get locked in. His friends need to help him out. You need to change points of view several times. Games like this where you change perspective usually frustrated me, but this one helped me along really well and still left me the freedom to feel like I was solving stuff.

This game had several neat parts: seeing how and why Gill liking English was relevant, having Barry’s more athletic friend Tony need to help him several different ways, and the accomplishments at the end that encourage you to try everything. Each friend-pair also has an interaction that moves the plot forward, and the game never forces pedantry on you. By this, I mean things like when you’re finally leaving for home, you don’t have to switch between Barry and Gill and Tony and have them all leave. They all do together, as friends should.

And I think that’s the sign of a good game. Once it asks for your time and makes you figure how the three different friends should interact, it doesn’t bog you down to stay or trip you up in unnecessary detail. It also has a good economy of items–there are enough for good puzzles, but not too many. All items have a purpose, even those with easter-egg deaths the game notes once you've won. After all, Barry isn't really supposed to be in the control room, and this drives the point home without being preachy.

Also, the game features a rotary phone. Rotary phones are good for a cheap laugh, but in this case, they’re part of an early plot point. So this is retro/nostalgia done right. The control room also has these details as well.

Playing this game reminded me I never got to do enough (relatively harmless) sneaking around with friends. We weren't athletic enough. So I missed out, but this game helps me enjoy how it would've been, without the fear of things going on my permanent record or whatever.

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Limerick Heist, by Pace Smith

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
If you think you might like it, you will., November 20, 2019
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

"What it says on the tin" games often can run into trouble. They're limiting by the end. The risk is double with poetry. It can get sing-song or repetitive. But in this case, I enjoyed the presentation, and the size is just about right. Limericks do seem to have just the right amount of flexibility: not too short, and not too long, and they never feel too pretentious or too low-class. I like writing them. I've written a ton. You can say what you want, move on from them and not worry if they're any good.

But stringing even two together--well, I found this tricky indeed.

You've probably seen the tropes before, and the blurbs fully admit to this: the leader of a heist gets people together, there are conflicts, things go wrong and ... well, because this is a choice-based game, you do have endings. And the bad ones are indeed rewarding. I certainly enjoyed them more than costly special effects at a movie, ones that are meant to draw out the drama but just overload me. A limerick's five lines, though, feel just right to me.

With rhymezone.com and various programs to track the meter, I suppose we can be picky and say, ok, that's something the game SHOULD get right. But the more subjective stuff, like plot, pacing and throwing out rhymes that are clever but not overdone, obviously require care on the author's part. And that's evident here.

I think the most telling testament I can give to the game's quality was that, on getting a bad death, I expected a good limerick for the "undo/restart/restore" option--and I got one! So it's very detailed. It has the usual technical stuff like letting you track all the different endings, but perhaps my favorite bit was how (Spoiler - click to show)one successful ending laid out the possibility of a sequel. And since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I'll leave you with this...

How quickly a game like this could
Grate awfully, it's understood,
Or stop feeling new
About halfway through
But don't worry. This one makes good.

I had an idea to write
A game like this but did not quite
Or really at all
Find ways to enthrall
With plot, humor, fun or insight.

The game's title thus brought to light
Ny shelved plans. So, quickly, despite
A wish I'd have spun
A tale half as fun
I'm thrilled THIS work got things so right.

(Oh, hey, look, this game helped me finally string a few limericks together!)

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Out, by Viktor Sobol

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
I played Out, and it wasn't played-out., November 20, 2019
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Out would have been good to see even if it hadn't been written by someone who'd been reviewing for so long and who had definitely earned their spurs to enter IFComp. The title threw me off at first, because while coming out is an important and personal act, it may be overdone in the community. This game is breezy and short and yet still covers a lot of original ground. I appreciated the lack of angst here, and I also enjoyed that the narrator's specific trait wasn't mentioned.

It allowed me to have a humorous perspective on a coming out of my own that went poorly: my family moved from a state-school university town to the city to near a private university, and my parents were a bit upset I liked that old university's sports teams, because I should prefer the smart kids to do well. And the state school wasn't particularly good at football, so I heard it from fans of much better teams. But liking the state school was just who I was, and the process of identifying as a fan still opens new perspectives.

That's probably a much more strained metaphor than the game, but I like that the game can feel <spoilers>universal while you slowly, um, explore the whole universe. Exploring the world of fandom, and how people deal with the absurdities of hoping one group of people they never met outperforms the second, has revealed something entirely different from more literary communities I like to hang around.

It's tough to have this minimalism mean a lot. And so I like what Out did, or what it did for me. This game didn't take long to play, and then I took longer to think on it than it took to play it, and the time was well spent in any case. Maybe Out will remind you of how you had the courage to be (or couldn't help being) different in a way that wasn't particularly dramatic or practical, and people wondered if you HAD to be that way, but it opened new doors.

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Roads Not Taken, by Doug Egan

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
I've been there, too. Well, almost as far., November 16, 2019
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Roads not Taken was the first game I played of my fellow competitors' in IFComp 2019. I sort of hedged things--I'd reviewed hardly any, so I wanted to pick something that would likely match up well with me. Maybe this isn't a perfect strategy, but it's helped me when I've been in a reviewing rut. And RnT turned out to be something good, at the right time.

Overviews suggested I had a lot in common with the somewhat autobiographical narrator, and I did, although I didn't do quite as much. I lived in the Chicago area from 12 to 18. The narrator got to Eagle Scout, and I only got to Life Scout, because I found other things more useful and fun to me. They got to graduate school, and I never tried. So this was about my own roads not taken, in a way. Yes, that's corny, but I remember not doing certain things and hearing "Well, you'll regret this." RnT managed to help push back against against some of the more overbearing advice that had lingered over the years, and I'm grateful for that. RnT not one of those works that say to give up and go pound sand, and it's not bragging, either. That can be tough to balance. I think it can be classified as an act of leadership, because it did help me brush aside horrid memories of people slightly senior to me talking down to me about all they'd done and how I'd better be grateful for the chances I have and not mess them up. It reminded me of things I wanted to do and things I felt guilty not wanting to do more. And at the end, it helped me do a few things I'd meant to do for a while.

The first bit, about scouts, tells of the narrator making it to their review board for Second Class (3rd of seven Scout ranks--they get progressively tougher) and saying he never really thought about doing more. I felt that way, too, and I think I really did eventually place both my ceiling and floor at Life Scout. I remember being able to calculate I could get to Life Scout just by showing up, but some of the merit badges with physical requirements seemed too much, as did the service project you needed. I wasn't on any athletic teams, and I didn't seem shouty enough for leadership, or what I thought was leadership. I remember feeling pushed around and manipulated by troop members two years younger than me. Once I got to Life Scout I remember finding other things to do and not wanting to spend my weekends on camping trips, and I also remember the scoutmasters (who were younger now than I currently am) had things they meant to get through to me. One wrote me a letter whe I quit the troop. Some details were personal, and some I forgot, but I remember there were some things that couldn't be said directly. I've learned them. Looking back now I think he was confident I would understand things that were confusing and frustrating me, I think he understood some of the questions I was too scared to ask and didn't ever talk down to me.

I think a reader will be able to relate to the narrator even if they weren't in Scouts. Having a goal outside of classes and trying to execute it, whether you succeed or fail, is an important adventure. I was lucky to find a couple I enjoyed more than scouts, even though they were less presitigous. And I certainly couldn't relate to applying to grad school, as I never thought I could.

I remember dreading the prospect of college interviews, not realizing that I had a right to make my own opinions about my interviewers–which you do, in this game, visiting potential graduate advisors. This seems obvious now, but there's an important coming of age there where you've realized adults aren't perfect, but you suddenly see none are close to perfect, even the smart ones who get a Ph.D. And I also thought to the times we had current or future graduate students as interns where I worked, and part of me was impressed by them going there, and I felt grateful they looked up to me even though I hadn't gone to graduate school. They helped me feel as though I'd learned more than book knowledge. I needed a break before and after the grad-school bit, not because I got bored or frustrated, but because I had enough to think about.

I';m generally not a fan of linear works, but I think it worked well here. As much as I hate the word “relatable,” I can see how it applies here–this work showed me a different angle on Boy Scouts or grad school than I saw. I don't think it's one I could have accepted at 25 or even 30. Looking back on Scouts and graduate school, it always seemed like the sort of thing I'd been guilt-tripped into, and it's good to see someone who also had those should'ves and who was able to see it more positively. And I also found that, even though I knew I could force the game to win, I remembered how there were classes I felt like I should get an A in them, but so what? It didn't feel like it really counted if I wasn't interested.

And I like how it is very personal without being in-your-face or needing silly HTML special effects. I think on the Internet, people overvalue attention-grabbing over letting the reader sit back and decide what is most important to them. Or maybe I just have more personal space as a reader than most, or less tolerance or need for excitement. It sounds like a backhand compliment to say "It wasn't exciting, but it worked for me," but I also think that a lack of excitement can help the reader focus longer. And it takes an important kind of confidence and skill to hold the reader's attention without the usual tricks to be exciting or to do anything dramatic. RnT reminded me of the times I hoped I was learning from my failures, or I was trying to convince myself that my decision to do my own thing was really my own and not lashing out against what was expected.

I wasn't looking to Sort Things Out when I played RnT, but that's what happened. I felt like I had a lot more to think about before I wanted to succeed in graduate school--I didn't want to "just win." And RnT talks about things like leadership, which is hard. One unwritten rule of good leadership is that you can mess it up by saying "Look! I'm showing leadership, here!" And over the years I've found acts of leadership in unexpected places, from people in positions of formal authority or not. It helps bring ideas out from people who forgot they had them, or it helps people want to be more, or it gives people better reason for doing things or wanting to do things.

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If I Wasn't Shy, by Joey Jones

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Revisiting after several years, I "get it" a bit more, May 8, 2016
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

It's always a treat to uncover something you missed. I missed it while I was beta testing. I thought I tried everything. But looking here and seeing the author had an alternative ending in mind, I--well, I sat down and found it, and what's more, (Spoiler - click to show)it makes sense in the context of its sequel All Alone. And it's very satisfying, and I don't want to spoil it if he doesn't.

But the characterization is very good, and if you only get the default ending, you'll have a few laughs and sympathy for the poor trapped character waiting for the grocery store to close so he can do...well, something, he guesses. This is all done without too much weighty angst, as the cashier observes other people who are probably about as unhappy as he is. In fact it's fun to unlock his frustrations.

I'm not going to rate this, because it feels like a conflict of interest as a beta tester. However, it is one of those games with a hidden ending that may not be quite as raucous or jolting or "a-ha" as The Ascot, but--it makes sense, and it made me smile and replay the sequel, and if you're an author, you may hope to do something like that for your readers.

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Rameses, by Stephen Bond

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Angst done about as right as you can get, August 17, 2015
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

The short version of this review: in Rameses, you wait around and talk to some people where the conversation is pretty much already decided, and life stinks, though it's way less blunt than that. I've written shorter reviews about much longer games.

It's certainly less blunt than my college-years "I can't move" style fiction. I wrote long stories and short stories, sure there was a much bigger difference than there really was. I probably had the right idea why I shouldn't write too much of it--it's just no fun for anyone involved, done straight up, though all the same, having a more public outlet might've helped me move on earlier.

And Rameses does capture this frustration, much better than so many recent Twine games that discuss emotional issues. It's beyond just useful therapy. I admit I shut the game down twice when starting just because I didn't want to put up with a bunch of profanity TODAY, if you please, even in a short game. So I had my own Rameses moments with respect to something that is not really a great task, abstractly.

What gives Rameses most of its success is how the conversations are structured--there is only one end, regardless of how many clever things you may think up that you could say, or someone more spontaneous could say. It deflates a convention of text adventures where someone's funneled into asking about something, and we sort of buy into it for plot purposes, or suspend disbelief, or appreciate a fourth-wall joke. But here, there's a helplessness whether you go with or fight the flow, like when (Spoiler - click to show)you're forced to guess the price of a pair of a rich fellow student's jeans, which he may be lying about anyway. This was the high part for me--NPC "lets" the PC and the player have "fun," or pretty much all the fun they deserve to have, and they have nothing better to do...right?

Now pretty much any work can shut off hope and it'll be given some credit for ripping open the honest underbelly of human nature by some crowd. I've read far too many of them, but I think Rameses deserves good credit for the brief episodes where you daydream, or observe things you can't speak about, or have chances where it'd make sense to say the obvious, and fail. It's just that Rameses's scope is limited by its own subject. There are only so many ways you can say you utterly have no choice. Rameses finds many and executes things well without overstaying, but my snarky side has to wonder how many people who hail it are partially praising themselves for getting through it unscathed, because they remember being a bit like that in college or high school, whether or not they swore too much in public or in our minds.

Not that I'd have the courage to say this to Stephen Bond's face, mind. I'd be too worried he'd laugh and, truthfully, say "That's the point." Or something even cleverer.

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Bill Belichick Offseason Simulator, by Jon Bois

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Touchdown plus three point conversion!, April 3, 2015
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

As a big fan of absurdist sports writing from the likes of Every Day Should Be Saturday, Fire Joe Morgan, Blackheartgoldpants.com and PFT Commenter, I'm always on the lookout for the next funny and surreal thing. BBOS is it. Whether you like Bill Belichick or hate him, this game transcends mere sports loyalty without resorting to the usual stuffy literary devices that critics say transcends this, that or the other. And I bet even if you hate American football, you'll like this, too.

For those not aware, Bill Belichick coaches the New England Patriots, and he's won quite a bit with them, all the while being kind of crotchety to the media and having his own fashion sense. He has an ability to take players nobody else thought was all that good and turn them into superstars. And so BBOS is, superficially, about his uncanny ability to do that, and his day-to-day operations as he looks for that next hidden superstar or designs that killer offensive play.

If you've read the introduction, though, you probably figure it's not going to try to be very realistic. At every stage it's largely unclear what is the best option, because the game puzzles purposely make as little sense as possible, except when the answer is obvious on purpose. And even if you guess wrong, you get a funny ending to back-arrow out of, complete with nonsense final score.

Your first big decision is whether to sleep in or get to work, and navigating the game's navel-gazing successfully gets you 1/7 of a code to put into a computer to design the ultimate offensive play. It's a purposefully annoying end sequence that still manages to block anyone wanting to cheat their way through, but there are spoilers on the 'net if you just want to win and see Pixel Bill Belichick earn even more atrociously practical gear to wear when he paces the sideline.

Still, sifting through Bill Belichick's other "boring" tasks to get all the codes is worth it, and it goes pretty quickly because the game doesn't pull that 5 second delay some needier twine games like to. You'll find codes in an impossibly huge hardware store where you click through about 40 aisles to find a doorknob, behind a rock band you need to "fight" (anybody having fun is a distraction, you see,) set a clock radio correctly, or win some weird board game. You get another piece for (Spoiler - click to show)assembling a superstar wide receiver from spare parts, which is a superior option to trading for one, drafting one or signing one in free agency. The game's rather rough, there. There's only one choice that's right. I picked it, but then I made sure the others did something cool when you made the wrong choice. They did.

The bad-good graphics and captions had me laughing, from the ways you swim through a pile of clothes to the various aisles in the hardware store, and really, it's just a pleasure to mess around and say, wait, I didn't poke that yet?

I'd really like to see more Twine games like this. It's about as inexcusable as you can get without resorting to profanity, and that suits me fine. It shouldn't take more than an hour, and maybe you won't think of it at all when it's done, but in an ideal world, we'd have a string of games like this we could just play and enjoy, so that doesn't really matter.

Wait, no. That's not quite true. When watching highlights this fall, I fully expect to remember some random stupid part of this game I didn't think I would when I see Belichick grouching on the sidelines, and that will be awesone.

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Endless Sands, by Hamish McIntyre

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Grainy in places, but likable, March 21, 2015
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Endless Sands scared me off with the title: were the sands endless? Algorithmically generated? Thankfully not. But it feels that way at first. You've been bitten by a vampire queen and need to find your way inside before light. You have about four hours of game time, or 240 moves. TLDR: it's a funny small-to-medium game with lots of nice big ideas that feels a bit loose, but there's no shame for a first time effort.

There are four possible endings, each with its own series of mildly annoying hijinks. When I say mildly annoying, I mean that they were just the right silliness to get under your skin without pushing you away. It was a good idea for the author to implement all four, though, as different players appear to have gotten stuck on different ones. And this provides a depth that so many other silly games don't have.

As you'd expect there's not a lot of NPC interaction, and what there is is a bit guess-the-subject. I maybe should've thought of (Spoiler - click to show)giving the werewolf something to chew. But the dialogue didn't point there, even though I found an actual subject that worked, I laughed. I think the puzzle for escaping below the surface was much fairer, and it had wacky humor and even a clever bit of programming where a radio gives static half the time. It was a nice little wait-nag as you had (Spoiler - click to show)seven colors to put in order, so when each had a 1/2 chance of appearing in a message, missing one wasn't critical. Or you could just brute-force.

This review is for version 1 of the game. The author, a first-time writer, showed interest in a post-comp release. So a lot of the cluing that's off (I assumed certain places were off-limits,) or the slapstick that misfires (though you see what the author's trying to do) or the technical stuff (command rejects can waste a minute) is forgiveable and easy to fix.

I had fun with the game, warts and all, and I hope the author writes a post-comp release. Even if they only have time to fix some of the bugs, I bet people will replay it gladly, if only to see the endings they missed.

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EXTERMINATE!, by Michael Martin

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Finds and fills a niche worth going over, March 18, 2015
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

EXTERMINATE! is a speed-IF that focuses really well on its concept. I saw the idea on move 2, but I didn't see the command to list everything you could do. But the game was nice and hinted me on move 6. This is an extra meta-puzzle, if you are curious, but only if you want to feel extra smug and brainy. I'm slightly sad I didn't, but I enjoyed the game well enough.

I was also highly amused that the game responded to a hidden command not listed. It was a juvenile try at profanity, and I'm impressed the author thought of a funny riff on the standard reject. It was also in good taste (Spoiler - click to show)the fella excluded another).

This is one game where I'd welcome an update version very much just because I bet it's hard to find everything in 3 hours, even if you (Spoiler - click to show)grep -i "ate$" complete-word-list.txt. Still, the game had more than enough. It's well planned, it doesn't overstay its welcome, and it has a few time-paradox jokes and alternate endings.

But this is enough. I shouldn't (Spoiler - click to show)Bloviate.

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Jarod's Journey, by Tim Emmerich

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
I learned a ... different lesson from this game, March 16, 2015
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

I'd read of this game as uniquely mediocre in its own way, due to its heavy-handedness. So it seemed like the sort I wanted to attack one day. I was a bit worried it would be long and convoluted and I'd get sick of it.

It's not really that bad and long--there are only three puzzles, and they feel like multiple choice (which direction do you go, and the game cues why.) Before that, an angel meets your character, and I was worried some sort of hideous death would befall me if I didn't ask enough questions, or if I asked too many. Even that introductory part is cringy--the game seems extremely well meaning, but the lack of details combined with spoon feeding the player to push on felt kind of bad. That, and there seem to be two good choices based on if your personality is introverted or extroverted. Sorry, (Spoiler - click to show)introverts! You lose! Thankfully, the ending text gives some explanation, even if it's not too rigorous.

Imagining how huge the game might be, though, gave me ideas how to construct something moral. And the few times I saw this game mentioned, I built it up as a Pilgrim's Progress, and it was anything but. Of course, I could've saved time by playing the game and maybe having all those ideas a bit quicker. And it won't be the last time I'm faked out by a big-sounding name.

So, the moral? (Yes! I have some over-general advice of my own!) If something seems intimidating, and you sort of do or don't want to look into it? Give it a shot and plan to try a few things out, then move on! And that goes for reviewing or playing something old. Don't worry if it might be too good or too bad, or you're saying something too obvious or too obscure.

I think religious and non-religious people agree this is good, if overgeneral advice. Of course, as in the game, there are pharisees who get this principle wrong, but still, it's good advice, and following through will be more gratifying than getting 3 out of 3 on a multiple choice test. I hope I can say this without snark that I appreciated the sort of failure that resulted from this game, and it was easy to see how I might fall into the trap. And it was a less painful reminder than something more robust. Not that it's a good idea to do this all the time.

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The People's Glorious Revolutionary Text Adventure Game, by Taylor Vaughan

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Not revolutionary game design, but so what?, March 16, 2015
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

PGRTAG was one of the first games I played when I came back to text adventures and judged for IFComp 2010. It doesn't seem to break any theoretical ground or have grand arguments. It would be easy to disqualify as dashed off, and I suspected once I saw ten or so games like this, I wouldn't be so high on it.

But after testing and playing a lot of games, I still haven't found many that reached this level. In so many humor games, I see what they're trying to do, and I say good job, but this one's jokes are immersive. I was worried from the title that the game might be overdone, but it feels balanced right.

Though originally I figured, sure, I enjoyed it, but it's not going to last. I figured once I learned more and saw more, I'd be glad I played it and all, but I really need to learn from more sophisticated efforts.

It's several years later and I'm still coming back to it, though, while games that discuss structure are more over my head, or I don't feel as invited to learn from them, or I figured I got their lesson and I'd like to move on. This game does pretty much everything it wants to, right. It's a spontaneous affair, and it has those touches I wish I'd seen. The over the top narrative voice makes fun of, say, coffee shops and people who complain about them too much. The puzzle where Comrade Rosalia wants to share Communist Manifestos with the students but needs one for everyone is funny and sad bad-logic.

The end result for me is a very spontaneous game. You're invited to try silly stuff, and in fact the two paths through the game are very funny, and the alternate solutions let you use items differently. There's a best ending ((Spoiler - click to show)don't use the pawn shop) and a not-best, and they both make sense.

I think the community needs games like this, to keep us all grounded, or to remember that you don't have to be academic to sort old ideas into new stuff, or even to enter into Interesting Arguments (all arguments between NPCs in the game are suitably ludicrous.) I mean, when I read about reworkings of an old myth or whatever, I can't really mark that as superior to something like this, which pastes silly tropes and leaves you feeling, yes, it's okay to write silly stuff and want to.

On the downside, there's some guess the verb ((Spoiler - click to show)POINT device at X) and some annoying disambiguation among devices, where you have three "(long name)" device to choose from. But the game's short enough, it's not a huge deal.

Sadly, I haven't seen the author again. I hope they come back. Even a game half as good would be very welcome. When someone writes a game like this, it's easy to feel they can just dash off another. But it's not so easy to find that big-idea sweet spot and execute it. Still, as a blueprint for writing something very funny, it's hard to beat PGRTAG.

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69,105 Keys, by David Welbourn

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Fun exercise for the player and writer. Warning: math nitpicking follows!, January 20, 2015
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

I found myself coming back to this game more often than I thought. The author intended it as somewhat of an exercise, so I don't feel right rating it, so I'll list what it's done for me:

1. been a go-to resource for I6 stuff, complex and basic
2. presented a meta-puzzle of how to group the number of keys more mathematically. Once I (thought I) found it, though, I think that solution loses some of the whimsy that makes the game enjoyable.
3. encouraged me to poke at the parser to try and do weird stuff (including figuring how to do this in I7--where, roughly in-line with the author's comments, I think it's a bit of a bear)

It's certainly an odd one, with relatively welcoming "meta" jokes. You may be able to provoke some of them with standard verbs, but if you don't, the AMUSING section at the end reveals them, and it's fun to go back and look.

I agree with the reviews that mention the solution isn't quite a logic puzzle, and once you "get" it, it's only so replayable. But it is more replayable than I thought it would be when I first cast it aside, and I like it.

At any rate, I have nowhere else to put this, so here is my plan for the "superlogical" version. While it's potentially a technical improvement, I don't see it as actually making the game any more fun, and I don't want this to feel like banging on the door for an update. I enjoyed the logical exercise that sprang from "maybe we should count the numbers this way instead" & hope some other people will, too, once they've played the game. The game encouraged/allowed me to look at puzzles beyond the main joke/mechanic, and that's always a Good Thing.

(Spoiler - click to show)2 types of scratches: dull and sharp. In a ratio of 1:2.
3 types of roundedness, in a ratio of 1:2:2.
9 colors, in a ratio of 15:32:32 etc. (Note: this'll give roundoff errors when you count keys for the properties below, and I can't think of a way for the game to account for this without giving spoilers. But 271 is prime & that messes things up.)
7 key brands, in a ratio of 1:2:2 etc.
1 other property, in a ratio of 1:2.

So the game can count key types by division.

Another way to do this would be to call the game 69120 keys, since 69120 = 2^9 * 3^3 * 5 (allowing for several 1:2 divisions,) or you could just have one division of 16 colors at the top as follows:

1:2:...:3 and pick, from the 3, 15 specific types to eliminate, and factor this in when picking that specific color. However, the game could also warn the player off, saying "Wow! That's probably not it, there're way too many."

68992 is maybe even a better number, being 2^7 * 7^2 * 11, allowing for 2 1:2:2:2 and 1 1:2:2:2:2:2 pairing, and you can maybe have an easter egg of a specific combination with 113 extra keys. 69000 is 2^3 (1:2:2:3) * 3 * 5 * 5 * 23 (1:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2), so that has possibilities, too, and 69069 = 3*7*11*13*23 and "only" 36 extra keys.

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Goose, Egg, Badger, by Brian Rapp

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Play, process, praise, January 9, 2015
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

This is the sort of game where I scream out "I want more games like this!" though I'd have absolutely no way to tell people how to go about writing them. It has the abstract puzzle-solving, but nothing too hard, and it has some puzzles you've roughly seen before, but nothing like the infamous 5- and 3- gallon jugs and needing 4 gallons, or whatever.

And some of the puzzles left me reaching for the hints even on replay a few months later, but it was more to see what happens next than to get on with it. It's a cheery and funny little farm game with a lot of harmless humor and down-to-earth writing.

Only it isn't quite. There's a bit more, and once I saw the alternate way through, yes, it's very clever, and I appreciated the twist once I saw it. The only problem is, I wasn't able to figure that out for myself.

The HINT (object) usage is very nice and forward-looking, and it's quite possible this game inspired me to use it in two of my own games. It's appreciated, at any rate, to keep immersion, and given how long ago this was written, the author deserves commendation.

Goose Egg Badger is a very good game that doesn't bring up philosophical discussion of What Interatcive Fiction Is, and that's just fine by me. It executes its own ideas faithfully and certainly left me smiling and wishing I could find a similar hook and share/execute it as well.

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Laterna Magica, by Jens Byriel

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
A very playable last-place effort, January 9, 2015
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IF Comp 2014, IFComp 2014

Laterna Magica got dumped on pretty harshly in the IFComp, but it's by far the best last-place game I've seen since I've paid attention (2010.) I'd go so far as to call it the best bottom-three game I've seen. This seems like faint praise, but when I paged through the comp results, I was shocked to find it dead last.

Its last place finish is probably more a result of a stronger field than anything else. Though I can see why people may've disliked it--it's about a journey to ultimate enlightenment, but with loops. A lot of them. There's one choice buried in one loop that breaks another loop, and the text is deliberately obscure, perhaps too obscure. Your choices are questions with no right answers, and while this is part of the shtick, there are almost no ways to get any right answers or clues you are on the right path. It seems philosophically correct that we don't notice that we're getting smarter, but there's no sense of progress or hinting we're doing it wrong besides "oh, this again." I got a semi-messy map out of it, and I stumbled through, but ultimately I didn't feel enlightened.

And three months later, I can't remember what I did, and I'm a bit worried about going back to find out. So I can't say this is a favorite.

Still, the game has a coherent start, a good premise, and a way through that's logical once you see it. It doesn't soar, but it works. It may give unpleasant flashbacks to those books people flog on you at the airport as "gifts," with different spiels whether you're reading a book or not (but could you please give a donation?) & some of the text rattles on. And while I love some so-bad-it's-good, and I've even had fun poking through underimplemented games and reassembling them to find out what's going on, this game feels more like it had good intentions and clear focus on its own but it never translated to the enlightenment it tries to give the player.

I generally try not to rate games I competed against in IFComp, but I feel sad this game has a flat one star. Doing math on the previous ratings, it even needed a three-star rating to bump it up. I can't quite give that in good conscience, but two stars--definitely.

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The Tale of the Cursed Eagle, by Slat Leering

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
About what SpeedIF should be, October 31, 2014
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

A year after EctoComp 2013, I found myself coming back to this game. It's a very good example of SpeedIF. While there's a lot that isn't implemented for you to examine, it's not critical to the story. The main focus is to run away from that beast that's chasing you.

From a technical level, you're just running around nine rooms avoiding a best that will kill you. It's possible to get stuck in a few places, but the game is short enough you can just replay. You can also find sanctuary from the beast to get several endings. I managed to get these, and they were still satifying despite not the "good" one that makes everything click--on re-playing, I see that a lot of hints were there. Though I sort of forgot for a bit about (Spoiler - click to show)The Wizard's Tower, as I may've assumed it was as impassable as the guard by the bridge to the village who wants money. But that's a minor hinting issue.

Speeding through this game under the deluge of IFComp 2013 entries, I missed that (Spoiler - click to show)the beast is half as fast as you, assuming instead that (Spoiler - click to show)the author wanted you to randomly teleport in the fairy ring. So somehow I managed to "fear" the beast and ascribe it more power than it had.

That's a good accomplishment for an EctoComp game. This is a high three stars in my rating, which for a speed game is very good indeed, and while I can't knock any game that placed above it--there were a lot of good ideas--I'm still surprised it wound up in the bottom half.

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Too Tall, by swampselkie

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Clever idea, but execution is not so great, July 2, 2014
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

This is a twine game about being tall--well, not really. It's got a clever misdirection where your mother is upset at you for buying heels. But the arguments she looks may sound familiar. They are (Spoiler - click to show)the standard arguments against homosexuality. This is a funny look at something where people can get too serious or obscure, or the implication is too clumsy, and while the story seemed to drag slightly, it worked for me. I also enjoyed the shout out to (Spoiler - click to show)Randy Newman's "Short People" at the end, which seemed to expand things beyond the game's main issue and to conformity. Yet at the same time, it recalled when I got taller than my mother and sister and I was treated differently...for a bit. And I even felt a bit apologetic.

So the trick works for me. But I wish it would not have taken so long to get there. The text-manipulation tricks that cause pauses didn't work for me--they feel more like shareware nags than real-life pauses. I think it's okay that (Spoiler - click to show)your conversation choices don't matter, you won't change your parents' mind, and they want to rant, but on the other hand, piling this on to 5-10 second waits for relatively short dialog leaves the work feeling like filler. So a new argument I hadn't seen but liked got combined with text effects I had seen but didn't like. These text effects didn't ruin the game for me, but they did leave me reaching for my handy PERL tag-stripping script, which kind of killed immersion.

I get the sense that, with Twine being relatively new, cool elegant text effects exist we haven't discovered yet will be able to give the reader (or me, at any rate) more of the effect the author intended. Unfortunately, my reaction was "not this again." But I'm glad I worked through that.

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The Peccary Myth, by Gerardo Aerssens (as Pergola Cavendish)

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Like a point and click game, but more sensible, June 17, 2014
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

I still prefer parser-based stuff, but PM was a well-done effort that managed to get the good parts of point and click (quick to navigate, immersive, easy to remember what you did) without the bad parts (tough to find the place to click for certain "puzzles.") On the strength of the map alone, which unlocks areas as you discover new evidence about aliens, PM is worth a go.

I mean, you can argue any Twine game is a point-and-click, but the big difference here is having a map you can look through and adjust. It's a bit above Bound, because there the map just described where you were in an apartment, and this was a cheerier, more absurdist mix of city and countryside.

There's only one puzzle in the game, which is (Spoiler - click to show)just remembering a string of four nonsense words, and while the writing doesn't soar, it's very pleasing to open up the university, the trendy areas in a city, and the secret passage from/to the desert.

ShuffleComp had many successful experiments, but this game felt like it built on several experiments the author tried themselves. I forget if I gave it a commended vote, but it was on the fence. It had sensible organization to go with a goofy back plot (the silliness quotient feels about right,) and that is always a good combination. Plus it reminded me I really wanted to listen to more Frank Zappa, and a side aim of the competition was to expose people to new music.

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Truth, by Carl Muckenhoupt (as John Earthling)

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Worth playing and that's the truth., June 17, 2014
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

While I can't find fault with any of the commended games in ShuffleComp 2014, which was a pretty strong competition, I'm a bit disappointed Truth missed out. It's very old-school parser stuff about finding and exposing lies. They can be exaggerations or oversimplifications or clunky wordplay society's grown to accept for convenience.

Whichever it is, it's not hard to find by lawn-mowering. The usual suspects pop up, with ads that lie, politicians, clergymen, and so forth. Though the lies are generally stretched so the game never does something boring like have an agenda. Just examine everything, including (Spoiler - click to show)a line of Keats's poetry (the one about the urn)and you'll get all 21 points. But instead of getting points, you unearth truths, debunk fibs, etc.

As a bonus point for amusement, the author's pseudonym is a trivial truth. Before people revealed who they were, it was pretty clear the author was, indeed, an earthling. Which was just the sort of direct joke that worked so well in the game. And what a tidy game it is--it fits into the Z5 format!

Also, I had some knowledge with my truth, (Spoiler - click to show)"beagle puss" as the Groucho disguise you expose for the final point and a Final Revelation. I like that you can Find The Truth even before getting all the points, too.

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The Cabal, by Stephen Bond

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
No LaRouches? Author, I am disappointed., June 17, 2014
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

I don't have a ton of conspiracy theories, myself, but for so long, I was simply unable to tell theorists to stop with that nonsense, already, whether it was about workplace, classroom or global politics. It's so tempting to listen, because that stuff's imaginative if you haven't heard it, yet it dies out.

Fortunately, conspiracy theory is fertile ground for satire, and The Cabal hits a lot of good points. It collapses several favorite political theories, places and lore into being about text adventures. This highlighted, to me, how conspiracy theorists like the me-me-me angle while really it's just more about an uncaring world and people willing to accept how things are to get by.

There's only one potentially vicious part. Though most characterizations are clear jokes, one personality is depicted as living at Ruby Ridge, which left me uncomfortable enough to look for an explanation. I got one here--well, at an archive.org copy of it--and was impressed. The essay's worth it even if it's a necessary distraction from an otherwise free-flowing game, because it hits on conspiracy theories some writers have when really it's about laziness or time limitation. It's also nice to have conspiracy literature that actually cleans things up.

I found the puzzles worked as conspiracy debunkers by giving you the opportunity to go off on useless tangents. So many of them (Spoiler - click to show)give the solution up front, then provide absorbing writing so it's possible to get caught up in details that utterly don't matter. The final maze is particularly funny, as (Spoiler - click to show)the game seems far more likely to trap you if you map it by UNDOing.

The author did the right thing by throwing a large chunk of this work into multiple-choice conversation. It establishes the character-player as someone with bizarre thoughts but never really kicks him--it's more about outlining your basic conspiracy theory fallacies. It's good for a thoughtful laugh, even for someone who wasn't present when the game was released.

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Another Goddamn Escape the Locked Room Game, by Riff Conner

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Plenty silly, but too abstruse, January 18, 2014
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

There isn't really one room to escape--there are five, but hey, that leaves a bit more to do, and the room would be pretty crowded otherwise. Maybe it needs extra walls to deal with all the fourth wall stuff you have to deal with--after all, the author is one of the writers for Kingdom of Loathing, an absurdist heavy-texted MMORPG that relies on that sort of thing. People who like that will probably like this. People who like this game will probably like KoL a bit better, since it's more polished over the years--it's the author's job, and this game was not. Still, it was fun enough.

There's a lot of annoying stuff like eating the bottle and not the pills, the right verb for the safe, and a terrible muddle climbing on things (Spoiler - click to show)you need to stack.

Overall, I think this sort of puzzle works well with an existing fanbase and with discretely labeled choices, because a player base can team up and decide what to do (or how to do it most quickly,) and the next person through can just get the benefit of the humor or maybe polish the solution. With just one player, though, it really bogs down, and there's too much to guess at--I found that to be the case on replaying. There was a lot I remembered and couldn't guess the right verb on.

This is a flawed game that people who're willing to sacrifice a bit of play for humor will nonetheless enjoy because it does enough to get laughs. Unfortunately, it falls into different traps than the ones it bemoans in the funny little introduction. Still, I'm glad it's there. Kingdom of Loathing fans will probably enjoy this when they've used up their moves for the day, though. They might want to have a walkthrough handy, too.

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Bell Park, Youth Detective, by Brendan Patrick Hennessy

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Absurdist setting, real emotions, December 11, 2013
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Bell Park was cathartic for me. Nothing terribly serious, really. It just made it easier to laugh at the tales of Haledjiann and Encyclopedia Brown that baffled me so much as a nine year old. So I gave this game a 2013 IFComp Miss Congeniality vote over a few other strong efforts that were tough to leave out.

I was apparently supposed to be impressed and motivated, but I was just intimidaed. I almost never got any of them, and even when I reread one of the books years later, that whole frustration returned to me. Even the well-written CYOA Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey (available on OpenLibrary) left me awed--though I was younger when I read it.

Bell Park kicks the concept when it's down, though. Bell never really stands a chance with the adult world, taking every possible wild guess and going with it. Or to be more accurate, the game lets you go through all the guesses. there is a lot to laugh at, from the condescending and clueless adults to Bell's constant change of assuredness as to the murderer. Her formulated accusations are perfect for her age, and if the actual murderer is completely unbelievable (if very amusing and creative,) I can easily remember having my opinion on several adults--famous and non-famous--when I was young. This game captures that sharply and without malice.

Some people claimed about the lack of interactivity and different endings, that is about the only fault I can find with the game. Something small like different endings depending on how many choices you/Bell lawnmowered through would be a neat boost, but I can't complain.

Also, the game's Twine layout just looks like a book. The font, spacing and page size. Once I saw it, I wondered why nobody had done it before. I suspect there's a lot more of this stuff you can do with twine. I hope to see it. As well as the straight-ahead just plain writing that Twine lets you do and that this author is good at.

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The Lift, by Colin Capurso

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
This game inspired a song I want to share, November 27, 2013
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: gimmick, song

I wrote a song about this game. It has three verses. One for each choice you make. So you can sing it while you play.

"Aaaah" noises in background throughout...last 2 syllables of each line repeated, except the final in the verse which is drawn out. BBAgg, GGGGDE

(Spoiler - click to show)
You must reach...the lift (the lift the lift the lift)/on the graveyard shift/if you get my drift/danger has been sniffed/
Zombies to be biffed/porn and kleenex gift/No time to feel stiffed/Your fate may be swift
Not much that's what-iffed/You just got short shrift/Hey now don't get miffed/now this song's adrift


This game swung and whiffed.

But seriously, this guy seems like a decent artist, if you google.

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Forbidden Castle, by Mercer Mayer

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Forbidding Parser, October 3, 2013
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Mercer Mayer's illustrations were part of my youth. They really brought the Great Brain series alive--which itself could make some good text adventures, with Tom D.'s scheming and puzzle solving. So when I confirmed he was the author of this text adventure nobody'd written a solution for, I figured it'd be fun to try.

Angelsoft parsers, though, tended to be not quite up to Infocom's--undoing doesn't work, and the randomized responses for nonworking verbs are just baffling. And they didn't have those neat InvisiClues. Which were almost necessary for Forbidden Castle. Mayer imagined a very cute world: a gnome with a weird belt, an ogre, a fairy, and other things that'd been done before, but the real charm of this game is how you can ride a dragon or pegasus to places you need to get. The whole map is connected at the end, but you don't see how at first--and there are plenty of weird deaths in the isolated areas if you do things wrong.

And you need to learn what magic items do--you're not told. Some help you around some magical beasts but hurt you around other. Wearing a sword gets you killed. Insta-deaths zap you a lot here, and it's not clear why. You can also assume it's a good idea to (Spoiler - click to show)pick up the bag on the first move, but if you don't, you're totally lost. The game gets in trouble a lot here.

The technical annoyances and Player Bill of Rights violationscan't quite obscure the imagination, though, so a walkthrough is recommended. But there is too much verb guessing and cheap death for an honest play-through. Most people won't have the patience for that.

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The Usurper: Mines of Qyntarr, by Scott Thoman

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Sir-Tech didn't just write sketchy RPGs, October 3, 2013
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Mines of Qyntarr is an unquestionably awful game. It plays like when I wrote BASIC tributes to Zork--or I would've if they hadn't run out of memory. Lots of points to collect, lots of simple but illogical puzzles except for the ones based on received knowledge, and lots of verbs to guess. And far too many locations to fit on one piece of paper.

You drop treasures in a well, which is not the trophy case from Zork I. There's a cool talking idol, but there's also a puzzle where the challenge is mostly to look up Funambulate by looking in a dictionary--that's like googling, for you younguns--and another that is different on the Apple than the PC (Spoiler - click to show)"Approach Queen" vs "Checkmate". Plus there's a monster called a yallou, which couldn't be copied at all from the grue.

Sir-Tech bit the dust soon after this, so the promised sequel never happened. I can't say I'm really sad. I wasted money on Wizardry I so I could play II and III. I just thought the games were too tough for me at the time. I'm just not sure I've ever seen such a large-scale, categorically awful game as this. Well, not one you would pay for. It even made me feel like a schmuck for wanting to write a game exactly like this as a twelve-year-old.

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> by @, by Aaron A. Reed

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Cute, but twitter still scares me., September 23, 2013
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

I bet there are plenty of reviews that say of a game, "it's good at what it does, but it's limited, and the author knows that." And I sort of have little more to say than that, here, about this game. There are lots of ways to riff on 140 bytes of source code (not counting white space) but playing this game always makes me try to be that much more succinct, and it helps me when I know I'm flailing in wordiness. The names of all objects are shift-characters. The solution (Spoiler - click to show)isn't hard if you don't overthink, and I in fact enjoyed saying, ok, this has to be simple, but even better was what this game opened to me.

Because I never knew about the whole TWIFcomp. It was a great idea and I was surprised at how many people submitted entries and tried silly and even dirty tricks. If you missed the comp, as I did, the results and source are at this link. I hope they stay a long time. And as someone once derided for not liking code-golf even though I should, I found something worth code-golfing and learned about all sorts of computeristic poetry and bizarre programming tricks from this. I bet there is something there for you.

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Living Will, by Mark Marino

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Four people's stories, choose your/their niceness, May 10, 2013
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

I think one thing it's hard for traditional parser games to do is encourage experimentation--Inform's default rejections are necessarily neutral yet tough to change. "You can't go that way." "You don't see any such thing."

That's not mind control, and more colorful options would annoy people anyway, but it's discouraging--shouldn't you have known beforehand not to X, or not to fiddle with Y?

Living Will's goal is unstated--maximize your money or, perhaps, your happiness, as one of four people close (or who can claim to be close) to ER Millhouse, a magnate who's made in the Congo with his company Droxol Vox. Each choice you make adjusts lawyer and medical fees, bequests (e.g. how much wealth you get,) DV's stock price, and even which of the four people you can be.

The first few times you'll undoubtedly stumble, but there are enough different ways to play the game, from too nasty to too generous, that you can--by the time you've run through a couple characters--predict how the third and fourth will do. I didn't dig in as deeply as I could have, but the parallel stories don't seem to change the basic facts of the past. You can change people's motives or how they feel now, but understanding the core story appears to be key in getting the result you want.

I'm a bit disappointed this game didn't do better in IFComp 2012, though I will waffle here and say I can't pick a game I'd boot from the top half, which this missed. I gave it a Miss Congeniality vote, though I also really enjoyed the games I tested. Perhaps the period-specific writing turned people off, but it seems necessary, to euphemize the dying man's actions.

Because of this and other things, LW feels a bit esoteric to start, and though it's clearly completeable in two hours, you need to have your thinking cap on to enjoy it, and you should try several radically different paths through before giving up on it. It's a good use of Undum's strengths, with the scoreboard that each move changes and a cool map of Zaire, too.

And any game where (Spoiler - click to show)unless you're very clever, the lawyers get most of the loot, even/especially when they help you rip off other inheritors, gets bonus points for me.

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The Presidential Pizza Plot, by E. Joyce

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
If you think you'll like it, you probably will, February 4, 2013
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Twine seems to remove the need to have a map, etc., that more formal text-adventure languages require. This low barrier may lead to a lot of barely-there games, but when it works (as in this game) it -feels- easy and intuitive and has has a high fun-to-text ratio.

You've got only two actual challenges per game, and they're seemingly trivial, which is part of the fun. You have choices like where to throw chocolate sauce at a space pirate or whether to put anchovies or spices on a pizza. These aren't new gags, but they don't have to be. This game combines pizza delivery jokes with some science fiction tropes, and crossovers like this always help keep the old jokes from getting stale. That, plus well paced text (no responses too short or long) make for a successful formula without feeling formulated.

It shouldn't take more than fifteen minutes to get through the whole game, including the amusing "bad" endings, if you're a completist, and it's well proofread and so forth. I even found that the "right" choice (Spoiler - click to show)was mainly trying for the silliest action, because that seemed to be in the game's flow. And it worked.

This game is a bit too short for me to feel comfortable giving it a rating, but there's more than enough there that if you like this sort of thing, you probably will like this game. Given its quality, I'd like to see something more ambitious from this author in Twine, though I also wouldn't complain about several other short games this fun instead.

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Kicker, by Pippin Barr

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Being Mark Titus, the game, November 18, 2012
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IF Comp 2012

American football is tough to write a simple game about. Many early computer game tries stunk as One on One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird soared. Even other Americans are baffled by the men in motions, the Wildcat formation, bubble screens, illegal procedure, or what's the point of extra points, anyway, since people make them most of the time except when they don't.

Kicker doesn't really deal with any of this. It doesn't try to. It's more about observation, without any direct humor. You're probably the least macho player on the squad--a placekicker. His good kicks are taken for granted and expected. He sees even less action than the punter, who is an NPC in this game and who looks down on the kicker less than the linebackers, the special teams coaches, and other people. And it's not recommended he try anything fancy.

So most of the game is spent observing, except for the time your team scores a touchdown or their drive stalls within field goal range (that's the last third of the field) and you're called into action.

The game even has a nice little scoreboard in the upper right, with the field position in the upper left, but the game text doesn't actually show this. I suspect it's a comment on how you're probably wrapped up in yourself.

The game seems totally random as to who wins or loses, but it's more interesting how your teammates try to ignore you or put you down. So actually, instead of going through the game, you're better off just hitting Z.UNDO to see what everyone is doing.

Sometimes the game is a bit too light on detail--it's not even clear if you're a pro or college kicker--and unfortunately there aren't enough scenarios that might make the game more interesting. Merciless undoing seems to show the game accounts for safeties and also makes long field goals tougher and even lets you incur a concussion, and the plays account for when there is little time left. The mad libs for the plays are pretty good, too, although sometimes a (slow) linebacker successfully covers a (fast) wide receiver.

I've probably said more about this game than the author intended, and it's an amusing curiosity. But given how the game started--my team went down 9-0 and I kicked a field goal--I sort of expected a dramatic end. And I think it would be amusing if someone could rig together a string of fake field goals, two-point conversions and so on to try to capture a game's feel and do more than this observational piece.

Given the author wrote a game about waiting in line, I think his game gave the intended effect. Nevertheless, there's the possibility for more, with maybe giving, say, the special-teams coach a turn, though I don't think a text game from a more active player's perspective could be effective.

Also, I really want non-default responses for (Spoiler - click to show)score and any sort of swearing, both of which are integral parts of the game, for better or worse.

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Sand-dancer, by Aaron Reed and Alexei Othenin-Girard

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A writer's game more than a player's game, but a good one, October 23, 2012
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

It's tough to write a tutorial game without making it sound patronizing, and it's tough to write an example without it feeling like an example. The Inform docs do a good job of explaining how to do specific things with the language. But it's tougher for a complete game to show you what to do.

And I think Sand-Dancer does this. Because I'm not strictly grading it on being a game, I'm not giving it a starred rating, because as an example, I think it gets five stars, and I find it hard to dissociate the learning tool from the game.

As a learning tool, it shows how to use basic Inform syntax, but more generally, it captures various stages of creation on the game's website, which is a nice blueprint for anyone making a game who wonders where to start and how to keep it coherent. This is more a comment on process than content, but I really like when programmers are willing to share their code and ideas, and it is well done. Especially in a game where there are a lot of things that may leave you wondering "how'd they do that? I'd like to do that." The game does a bit of everything with the Inform language--scenes with NPCs, opening new areas, variable text, and even defining new objects and concepts.

As a game, it offers a lot of possibilities. You play as Knock (Nakaibito) Morales, a high school dropout who's crashed his Jeep into a cactus with a cold desert night approaching. He's impregnated a girl and is not really sure he loves her. He's hardly a hero, but the game never gets too sappy or too judgmental. He has to pass a few survival tests, although there's no real way to fail them. The game, and the book about the game, stress a lack of cruelty to the player in the narrative, and I think it works well.

After passing each survival test, Knock visits a spirit animal who replaces bitter memories Knock needs to let go of with virtues. Virtues allow you to do things that seemed too hard before, such as (Spoiler - click to show)being brave enough to reach inside a spider web, and once you get more resources, you meet more spirit-animals that guide you toward your ultimate choice. I very much like the setting and uncomplicated puzzles, too--the Arizona desert is probably a mystery to many Americans, far enough but not too far from cities, without any silly Wild West romanticism or melodrama.

But what I remember about this game was the "I see how they did that" moments that go beyond how they did something in Inform. General design and user-friendliness principles come out in the game, too. I'd really like to see a similar sort of game for other IF programming languages, because I think it'd be handy. This sort of thing seems ideal for collaboration. But I think the key is never trying to blow the player away, and Sand-Dancer is never too fancy. But it's never too simple to feel like you're being herded through a tutorial.

The source and notes on Sand-Dancer at its website were good enough to make me buy Aaron Reed's book eventually. That adverb should not have applied. But that is another review for another site.

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The Ascot, by Duncan Bowsman

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Yes/No adventuring with versatility and flexibility, October 22, 2012
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Back before Choose Your Own Adventure got tiresome for me, I still wondered. Why wasn't there more where what you did before affected the choices you could make? Without cheating? I think there were a few examples--one CYoA asked if you had talked to a weird guy who gave you a clue, with a better ending if you did. It couldn't track game states without being spoiler-ish.

The Ascot takes advantage of this in many ways, both to slip in a few jokes and provide different endings. The humor's pretty off the wall, from the not-so-subtle railroading (there're several riffs on the But Thou Must trope) where you pretty much have to take the Ascot, to making sure you only type YES or NO, to forcing you along to a park or searching where you need to. It's rather fun to be heckled by the good-natured parser, and I enjoyed trying to be stupid. The side paths don't take too long, although you do get stuck if you (Spoiler - click to show)utterly ignore others' help.

What characters there are, are good. Gertie, your friend, is a good agent for moving the game along, and the beast you fight at the end is silly and fearsome.

But just a string of jokes wouldn't be enough. The author took huge risk (Spoiler - click to show)including the "decent" ending and not the best one in his walkthrough and, in fact, not showing us the best way through. This almost surely cost him a couple places in the standings. However, knowing what I know, it was a pleasure to work things out, and as someone who played the game after the comp, I'm glad he made this choice. Other reviewers have alluded to this, but really, figuring out what to 'really' do is clever. I think it's adequately hinted that you need to do something, and the sheer lack of options makes it frustrating you don't quite know what you do. Until you figured it out.

I giggled stupidly after finding what to do, and the final puzzle is a delightfully annoying brain teaser, consistent with the game's friendly needling. This game packs a lot of fun into a short amount of time, and it leaves me hoping there are other games out there. It's clearer than many other multiple choice games, and it offers an example of how restricting choices can make for a tighter puzzle. I am sure there are other ways to do it, and I hope to see them.

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Fingertips: Come On and Wreck My Car, by Paul Laroquod

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
18 ways to crash your clunker, May 31, 2012
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

A lot of the Apollo 18 one-movers followed the basic formula of forcing the player to pay attention to detail to find out newer, more precise moves. Some made an actual story. COWMC doesn't quite, but its different branches certainly provide a lot of amusement. It's got a nice little percent-solved meter, and the mathier among us will see the number of ways through. Some obviously contradict each other. And plus, it starts with your car falling and manages many endings other than the obvious one. Strictly they're implausible, but so's a falling car, and it's more than fun and well-written enough.

You'll need a bit more patience reading than with What's That Blue Thing Doing Here or Leave Me Alone, which are worth playing to compare and on their own, but it definitely pays off. It allows more different actions than LMA, which is more about finding fun wrong stuff and using classical IF commands than about observation. There's more of a narrative than WTBTDH, which has some really clever meta-jokes I'm a bit jealous of.

The one thing I would add to this game would be a (Spoiler - click to show)tally of what you've looked at and maybe how you got it, or maybe even eventually hint which endings you need to re-look at(yes, one of my Apollo games needed this even more,) so you spend less time running in circles (I did, and so did ClubFloyd,) wondering if you took care of X or Y or Z. This sort of violates the strict one-move premise, but given how endings clue new endings & that's part of the game's strength, it could help the player get that last lousy point from a blind spot he may have.

That's technical, though. This is an effective and entertaining use of the one-move limitation, and I'm glad I eventually got to be part of a group that worked through it all.

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Mortlake Manor, by Ben Chenoweth

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
On the plain side, but , May 15, 2012
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Mortlake Manor is very old-school in its approach. It has a generous map, a couple of mazes, and even some randomization. But it is a bit on the plain side. There is a little too much walking and not enough reward. I'd have liked more items and fewer rooms, as I spent a good deal of the game looking at my maps and typing in commands without looking at the screen, especially once I retreated through the mazes, (Spoiler - click to show)with the 15-room nonreflexive-direction garden maze (too long!) causing particular annoyance. I tried dropping items in rooms since I didn't get the gauntlet--which probably needs a description, or a clue it can be loosened, so here's where more is less. I just wasn't expecting anything new, and when a player's staring at a chart of which room goes where, the author has lost him a bit.

It's certainly tempting, once you get the hang of text adventure programming, to start creating more rooms, since the first is the toughest--but here, we have several named "east-west corridor" and even two adjacent ones named "back door." This requires nontrivial technical skill to DO in Inform, but instead of adding to the mysterious feel of a mansion, it leaves me wondering what's so special and upset I'll have a few more rooms to walk through if I leave an item lying about. I was especially nervous about (Spoiler - click to show)the hammer, which never got used but was in the corner of my mind--and the game's map. What was it for?

Another thing that could be explored is: (Spoiler - click to show)the ghost gets you points if you study it passively. Why not have it do something, or be able to follow it?

To the author I would say--publish a second release that is not as faithful to the original as this one. Have fun and ask your testers what they'd add. Maybe you can cut down and describe the rooms more, or take advantage of some Inform-specific stuff, while keeping the original somewhere else. Describe the rooms or cut them down, or both. I have one test I like to do for a game--how does the author's by-move walkthrough look when printed out? And this game is a lot of walking around. The story's relatively sparse.

Things like the help and the (Spoiler - click to show)acronymic maze clues in two places show the author has a strong idea of making the game fair. If there's a way to clue without just leaving a few irregular verbs out there to try, then that allows for more immersion and not picking a verb vs guessing one. It helps the player avoid annoyance, but all the same, if a player is looking to avoid annoyance while playing the game, the game needs to change its tack.

I hope this is not too harsh treatment for a first-time author with the guts to put his work out there for opinions. I'm nearly certain the author can make this review obsolete with a second version. In fact, I look forward to it.

(ps - email for transcript if you want it.)

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The Absolute Worst IF Game in History, by Dean Menezes

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
A review and a request, May 4, 2012
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

I'm not big on pointing out a bad game is very bad. Eventually, there are only so many ways to say it. So why does this game merit a review, as a 5- or 6-room maze?

I managed to map it, or I think I did, by seeing (Spoiler - click to show)if the room I went to had a description or not and undoing a whole lot. This is an interesting exercise in logical deduction--and if you like this sort of thing, it's worth doing once if only to say 'Hey, I'm better at this when the Zork I thief maze scared me and I actually had ITEMS to leave around.' It is not as potentially hair-pulling as some guess-the-verb games without walkthroughs. In theory. However, GtVs have plot and humor, and you can see what the author is thinking later, and you can pretend he really meant to X or Y.

So my practical side is satisfied that this game is just awful. But my solve-everything side noted that Googling showed you apparently CAN get to the last room and get that item. But straightforward logic doesn't seem to work. Or maybe you have to visit rooms in a certain order. So I feel half-guilty writing a review for a game like this because it may make someone else try the same thing I did.

Yet at the same time I think anyone who likes to play with fire (or the occasional bad game) doesn't deserve to suffer more than five minutes through. If there is anyone out there with a walkthrough, or who remembers, "Oh, you do this," it'd be community service to post it.

But please don't try to play the game again if you don't!

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Back to the Future: Marty Quest, by George Gipe, Ryan North and Hulk Handsome

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Made me laugh, April 26, 2012
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

I can't give stars because if you like this sort of thing, you'll like the game (I did,) and if you don't, you won't. And I hope this review doesn't wind up looking like a beta-test for a game meant to be part of a speed competition, where these things happen & are part of the fun.

Because speedily written games don't have to be profound. If they try too hard, in fact, they'll fail. So often they are battles of quick laughs vs implementation. This game's subject is a good one--one of the worst passages in a truly terrible book I read many years ago--and it borrows from a blog post that gives a shell of a ridiculous game.

The solution is straightforward if you (Spoiler - click to show)follow the link on the game's page and it's also one of those games where you only have so many items and so many things to do, and the verbs are hinted well. The extra endings, good and bad, added to the blog post are quite funny, too.

In the first version, you can (Spoiler - click to show)just take the skateboard to make like a tree and leave before distracting Strickland, which gives a funny if not logical ending, or you can (Spoiler - click to show)reach a "win" room (irony?) if you go west with 6 points, instead of opening the door to the west to stick yourself in a no-win situation. You can also (Spoiler - click to show)set off the smoke detector without shooting the matchbook at it.

These are mistakes. I think. But then, the full solution also follows the rule of (Spoiler - click to show)making everything in the game have a purpose, so it could be the author throwing in another joke. Especially since these errors are far less grating than the awful writing the game makes fun of. But I don't want to think too hard about this. This game gave me several minutes of genuine juvenile humor which allowed it to get away with glitches. And I really like Strickland as a text adventure villain.

If the author revises, though, I demand (Spoiler - click to show)a clever rank for if you score 0 out of 8.

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Three More Visitors , by Paul Stanley

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
> X GHOSTS AGAIN. SAVE TINY TIM., March 31, 2012
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

There's some flexibility with Speed-IF. People are given several things to put in a game and a soft time limit of three developing hours. TMV follows all the rules except the time limit, and that was the right one to break.

The reader quickly sees the game is based on A Christmas Carol, and the title gives away the plot's basic outline. Scrooge, is once again visited by three ghosts, and he needs to use what he sees to foil his evil twin's plan--people trust Scrooge TOO much now. There's all sorts of Dickensian intrigue with opium dens and dark alleys and such without directly copying Dickens, and while there's no shortage of good description--much of which makes some good puzzles clearer--the game never really textwalls the player.

And why should things be impossible? I don't think many people think A Christmas Carol suffers from being shorter or easier to read than Bleak House. The ghostly visits also provide natural breaks when that give a great idea of how far along you are, so the game is well-paced.

A bonus point: when I was part of the group that played this at Club Floyd, at several points we realized where the idea suggestions for the Penultimate Not Numbered Speed-IF would be dropped in, and it all fit in well. Not just for a few belly laughs, which is perfectly good in speed-IF, but even Doom III brought out part of the author's alternate Victorian London. This sort of thing would be terribly corny in a graphic adventure (I bet people could muck up the ghosts, too,) but with text, you don't have as many tools to overdo things.

This game stayed with me enough to write a review of it three months after playing it on ClubFloyd. While I haven't played nearly as many text adventures as I want to, I can't imagine too many stronger first efforts than this, and I can't imagine many stronger speed-IFs, either. TMV seems easy to enjoy whether or not you've read Dickens's original. So I don't know if anyone has any holiday text adventure traditions, but TMV could be a very nice one to start.

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Nudists Gone Wild, by Hulk Handsome

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Because this sort of thing doesn't HURT anybody., December 27, 2011
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

If you like cheap yucks, then this author's works are worth looking at. This may be the most complex of his works, featuring different verbs, a timing puzzle and various silly deaths you know are there but you just have to try. NGW features different verbs and actual puzzles. And it's been tested since its initial release, with a few extra jokes thrown in, with "you can't go that way" better supported.

I'm a bit confused as to why I needed to (Spoiler - click to show)enter and leave the nudist colony in order to leave the place called "win" and win, though I'm probably missing a meta-joke, and also this would've been handy to speed things up:

(Spoiler - click to show)does the player mean unlocking with the iron key: it is very likely.

It's a bit too short to give a meaningful rating to, but basically, it's good for a small lazy break when your usual time wasting games aren't cutting it. On playing games like this I feel sure I could do better, then I sit down and realize it's not so easy. I like the riff on clothes in an IF game, and that's enough for the time the player needs to invest (a few minutes.)

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Raising the Flag on Mount Yo Momma, by Juhana Leinonen

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Everything unfunny is funny again--eventually, December 27, 2011
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Yo Momma jokes were a big hit over ten years ago. Then they got old. RtF brings them back successfully. As a quest for redemption, at where you look to take down Gus, the reigning insult champion at Club Compass, by digging dirt on him. He's got three ugly secrets. Get personal, and you win. You're helped (vaguely) by Joe Mahma, a legend of the art, an in-game hint system that gives about the right amount of nudges, and the ability to move to a room by typing its name.

All this could smooth over a lot of design mistakes, but I didn't find any. The path towards the end of the game is pretty economical--everyone has one purpose, and it's pretty clear whether you need them to do something or you need to push them out of the way. They're based largely on stereotypes here--there're two bouncers, Gus's ditzy girlfriend, Vincent the bully, Gus's posse, a sleazy guy at the bar, and a nerdy guy. We all know the tropes behind these, and the player should have a good general idea what to do. There are a few Lousy Last Points as well, and those quests are fun, too. There're observations about how silly and shallow clubbing can be. You've probably seen a few, but they're fun to revisit in a new context.

In the end, I felt just a bit sorry for Gus, but I guess show business is pretty cutthroat business, especially when it directly involves who gives the best insults.

The only thing I would add is a (Spoiler - click to show)block swearing rule where Yo Momma so threatening, you're worried what she'd do if she heard you, or something--especially considering the game does a great job avoiding swearing. But that's techie talk, and I probably only thought of this because everything else is implemented. I'm glad the game got expanded from speed-if to a full work, because it was satisfying to play and a great reminder that you don't have to be serious to be clever.

Also, extra points for the author including the source with the game. I learned a lot of details from that (beyond the lists of "Yo Mama" insults--one which works, one which doesn't,) and you will, too. It's clear enough that it can double as a hint-book if the in-game hints aren't enough.

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Ted Paladin And The Case Of The Abandoned House, by Anssi Räisänen

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Nice odd puzzles that won't weird you out., November 20, 2011
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)
Related reviews: IF Comp 2011

When I saw the name of this game, I was pleased it came up early in my IFComp 2011 random play list, whatever it was about. It turned out to be the sort of thing I like. The puzzles made me laugh, even when I felt they didn't quite work. Most do. And this uses some of what makes text adventures unique.

The only plot in the game is to figure how it's messing with you. There's some back-story about the house getting steamrolled to make way for a mall, but that's mostly for expedience. When faced with the actual first room description, I was immediately jolted. It works.

Another room contains a color-related puzzles with potentially dated, but likeable, puzzles, and the final one--where you have to open a door to leave--may have had opportunities for a few more items, or a more complex interaction. Describing what happens would be a spoiler, but once I learned the rules I was slightly disappointed to learn "is this it?"

These are a lot more complaints than I really voiced playing the game. My emotional reactions were "Oh, neat, you do this--or maybe you do this or that--and I see how this clue should've fit in if I were paying attention." Plot may've gotten in the way of the puzzles, here.

I have to admit, I'd be very glad to write a word-puzzle game this good. And I'm doubly impressed someone wrote it in what is not their native language--and wrote it with very few grammatical errors. I hope Ted Paladin is called into action to navigate a maze or somewhere else that's been "done already," in the future. It'll likely be done differently enough to enjoy.

Slightly above the average 3 stars here. With a hat-tip to the cover art for possibly being stairs that go up or down. It's a cool illusion and captures the ambiguity you need to resolve in the first and last puzzle rooms quite well.

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Gigantomania, by Michelle Tirto and Mike Ciul

3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Kentucky Fried Anti-Communist Tract...until the end, November 19, 2011
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

I've suffered through a few Ayn Rand books. This game's better than they are, and not just because it's a lot shorter. It makes Stalin a more fun person than the people he repressed, which is rather clever, but unfortunately it stacks the deck.

Gigantomania's broken into four parts. Three require repetition and fawning to the local bureaucrat, and the fourth pretty much ignores what you try to say. It's the best one. There's always a trick to books showing people's lives are tedious without bringing the reader in, and in the case of a game, having to repeat actions to get to the next bit is just crushing.

That's the first half of the game. But then it turns toward being able to sneak around as you get more power--the (Spoiler - click to show)interrogation scene offering some wonderful, revealing ways to lose. But unfortunately anyone who has read why Communism failed will probably know this. And anyone who hasn't may wonder if all this repetition's necessary.

But the final scene is quite simply very clever. It's a chess game, and it's worth playing for that alone. I'd always interpeted "Communist style" chess as something different--the art of only allowing small advantages nobody enjoyed, more like a typical Karpov-style win where you mess up your opponents' pawns and win a tedious eighty-move rook and pawn endgame.

Here the author made the right decision. The interpretation (Spoiler - click to show)of killing all your allies to bring the enemy king near yours for the final evil laugh is wonderful and expedient. I didn't see it right away. It's the best anachronism I've seen in IF (Stalin died in '53, but the game occurred 40 years later.)

If the game could have a running side-story as clever as the last bit for each of its four parts, it would feel a lot less like Kentucky Fried Anti-Communist Tract and more like something special. I'd replay it for sure.

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East Grove Hills, by XYZ

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Advanced students feel melodrama, too, November 19, 2011
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

EGH is about a shooting during one advanced student's oral presentation for an Advanced Placement class. And I suppose that if a bunch of AP students also wrote an IF game, they'd probably have ones that get more stars and flow more coherently with this, and have more interesting branches, too. Having been in this sort of high-pressure class, it's hard to forget the concern trolls and gaslighters saying "I thought you were smart, but you couldn't even..." to various people at risk of being demoted to mere honors classes.

They'd probably be factually right, not that it makes them better people--the game manages to be badly formatted, disjointed, and crunchingly linear at the same time. You often have just one direction to move. Menu-based conversations make it hard to ask what you want, especially when the "say nothing" option refuses to vanish, and it gets troubling when you have options to be rude to friends with little cause. What seems to be the "best" one discusses (Spoiler - click to show)starting a society of people who dislike being stressed out. Though I did find the school assembly to be good, wicked, frustrated satire. Everyone in high school "knows" those are useless.

But there's too much melodrama, though--the game didn't really need a shooting to discuss the issues of emotion and connection the author really seems to want to deal with. It's all a lot like stories I remember from creative writing periodicals in college where people either drop out and work at McDonald's, write a letter for five pages before junking it, or grow up exactly as unhappy as their parents.

So EGH is about people having to get everything right to get very good grades, and if not, many people will be disappointed. But conversely, EGH got a whole lot wrong, and that's no reason to look down on the writer, who failed to separate the main character's confusion from his own. He said a lot that needed to be said, and was important for him to say. And say badly. I have no idea how much the author suspects or knows this. Hopefully in a few years he can resolve his problems and not be ashamed of what he's written and recognizing that maturing and understanding doesn't have the high stakes and time pressure of an AP class.

I didn't know what teachers were saying when they gave me a B or C and said I really had something and should keep working. I understand they were not giving the same backhanded compliments and encouragement some more competitive students did, but they had to evaluate work objectively, too.

I have to say the same to this game. I can picture the author/narrator being alternately worried he would wind up saying something too stupid or maddening or disjointed to put things together--imagining more "with-it" people holding it up as proof that person was crazy--before just typing something up a few nights before the contest.

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Jesus of Nazareth, by Paul Allen Panks

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Unfortunate, but I can almost understand, somewhat, August 12, 2011
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

I've read that many other Panks games were real messes. I've even seen people refusing to play his games because they're, well, his. But Ninja's Fate made me curious enough to give the game another look. Based on ratings and comments, this seemed like the safest one, and while it has few positively memorable moments, it's playable, mostly coherent and straightforward. The in-game help is useful and direct. This is no small personal accomplishment in a game built from scratch.

The only problem is that this doesn't translate into much fun for the player. People tell you, as Jesus, what to get, and you get it. JoN is nothing more than a fetch-quest with some RPG elements. You must convert four of six possible disciples(Spoiler - click to show), though you can convert three of them with one fish, and satisfying each one feels like bribery. You start out with a dagger and tunic, then you move up to a spear and helmet and shield. Once you start a fight, it is to the death. Each side has hit points. Hit messages can be grossly inappropriate: "Sweet mercy! You crucified him!" Yet winning is not hard, though you do some iffy things (Spoiler - click to show)like killing Harod and a few centurions--though all those weapons are probably a clue.

JoN shows a certain attention to detail, or a wish to attend to detail. The room and item descriptions show imagination. But then Mary Magdalene is described as a small town and doesn't even take the item she asks for. Also, drop in fig and olive trees you can't climb or examine, or leave a sick boy none of the in-game verbs did much to help. Scattered scrolls, if read, have bible passages galore which are too long to really be interested in, and converted disciples blather interminable platitudes.

It's unfortunate Panks isolated himself and was never really able to ask for or use other people's criticisms by the time he wrote something like this. JoN obviously needs help, but it equally obviously would be worthwhile. Perhaps using an established language, he'd have had time or energy to iron things out better. With a tester or two, he'd have had something more polished.

I know what it feels like to realize I've passed on asking for creative or technical help--especially when learning programming early, by not using or asking for help on a script from someone I disliked--and I remember the reasons I gave to pass it up, and hopefully I've learned somewhat to change course if I get in that trap. It's sadly but memorably ironic that in a game ostensibly about one of the great forgivers, the author did not take advantage of much more earthly graces.

Maybe I'm just rounding up to two stars as a sort of respect for the dead, or for someone more diligent in rejecting criticism than I could be. Or maybe it's a harsh learning experience to see my own mistakes magnified, or it's humbling to see I can empathize or vaguely identify with someone who made such big mistakes, and seeing an honest effort from someone who never really put it together has helps me move on from my own mistakes in the way that a perfect game or even a great tutorial never can.

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Guess the Verb!, by Leonard Richardson

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Don't be scared of the title. It's misleading, anyway., December 1, 2010
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

Some smart-aleck was eventually going to riff on the IF trope in the title name, and I'm glad it was someone clever. GtV isn't a long game--the central joke would grow old--and it's not tough, but you can extend the experience by examining everything and rifling through hints of problems you've solved. I haven't seen anything this odd that actually worked in text adventures since _Nord and Bert_.

As an 11-year-old lost at a fair, you find a robot named Lalrry who will let you Guess the Verb for a shiny quarter. You have a dull one, and there's a useless quarter-shining machine nearby. Cue the twisted meta-humor to manipulate the genuinely creepy, though harmless, Lalrry. Each verb you guess sends you to a scenarios featuring an evil wizard, a mad scientist, a dwarf, a spaceship and the author himself, in a particularly metafictional computer lab. The last one actually works.

You're not really guessing the verb in these. You just need to find where to use it. You even help some poor souls who can't quite guess their own verbs or solve a puzzle while your nemeses guess theirs.

Given how small the areas are, the puzzles can only have so many solutions, so there's a ceiling to trial and error, unlike true verb-guessing. Still, GtV's effortless surrealism makes the game feel much bigger than its solution, and it may help you laugh off stress in the next game that requires actual verb-guessing.

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Human Resources Stories, by Harry M. Hardjono

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Look! The XYZZY response has more text than the game!, November 30, 2010
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

So on the surface this game is a 9-question interview where you are graded on your answers. Survive, and you're graded on teamwork, leadership and technical skills, and you get a salary, too.

It's not entirely that simple, though. XYZZY gives background--too much--and gives pages of ideas what the author was trying to do.

While (Spoiler - click to show)one easy "win" is >3's all the way through, the game gets interesting when you twiddle one answer to see what happens. And it's pretty clear that if you're too lousy in one area, they'll thank you for an excellent interview and "the phone never ring."

Unfortunately there's no cluing from the interviewers if you're in trouble or doing well. You're left reverse engineering the answers. Change one and see what happens with your grades, and soon you can figure which answer doesn't just trade one grade for another. It's a cute learning exercise but, like crazy IF mazes, more technical than imaginative. Some answer swaps show scorched-earth approaches are penalized, and computer industry people who look into it may find heart and a touch of irony.

They won't find a good game, though. It could be an interesting side puzzle, and if he had put some of the energy from the XYZZY response into describing the interviewers and cluing when you are in trouble, it would be more than an elimination puzzle. As it is, I got all A's and $100k a year after spending two five-minute sessions that felt much longer.

This game may have inspired me to write my own multiple-choice vignette as a sort of therapy. Perhaps I will suggest such an activity to the next ranting co-worker. But the playing experience also made clear that something like this is not seriously publishable as a stand-alone work.

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