Reviews by Andrew Schultz

One of the dangers of waiting until the last day of a comp to judge and create everything is, there may be one entry that sticks with you and you want to think over, before you move on to the next one. Which is usually a good thing, but if you've procrastinated, well, you'll have to put that off. That's the story of me and I Got You at EctoComp 2025.

I looked at the cover art a few times and wondered what "I Got You" meant. It's a flexible phrase. I figured it might be a play on the Sonny and Cher song, or even a man showing off a woman and his trophy wife. The second of these of course is very bad, and it's been covered in other ways, but the initial implication of "I got you" is "I will have advice for everything, and if you slip up I will help you." That's your wingman, Tom. But as the story goes on, it's revealed to be more about "Ha, I GOT you," as in Tom catches you making a dumb mistake and goes all "what were you thinking." Also, in some branches, Tom has you to listen to him, and you can't push him away ("I got you cornered.")

It starts as a relatively straightforward advice for a date. I got you, says Tom. In this case, it clearly means, I have your back. I'll pick you up if you slip and fall. It may mean other things later. He hints what to say, and you don't need a lot of reading comprehension to figure it out. His advice is very general -- one funny bit, you pick the right ice breaker but he is quiet on the follow up, where the wrong answer makes you look very foolish indeed. And yet the wrong choice could potentially be spun at least as well as the right one.

He tells you how to say the right things to get a woman to be interested in you. Most of this is pretty basic advice, like don't be a jerk, or don't talk about boring stuff, or don't be too melodramatic or unenthusiastic. These aren't the deal breakers, though. There's only one question that matters, and because it is unusual and potentially unexpected, I won't spoil it here. But you have a choice on with or not to sympathize.

Tom wasn't prepared for this, or at least, he wasn't prepared to give positive advice. Because boy oh boy, if you do the wrong thing, he gives you quite the gish gallop full of whataboutism and other conversational tricks. Usually I'm opposed to huge walls of text and having to sift through them, but here, it's appropriate, sort of how someone gives you quick useless advice to start, and you can pass it off as keeping it simple early on, until you realize there's not too much depth. But once you slip up taking their advice, even if their advice was self-contradictory or bad, boy howdy do you hear it. We've all had that sort of person, whether it be for romantic advice or otherwise.

And that's why this piece worked for me, because it was ostensibly about going on a date and impressing a girl you like, but on the other hand, it brought back much more low-key and platonic memories for me, of someone being a slightly unwanted guru that I listened to at first out of politeness. I had my share of other males in high school who would tell me about how to talk to chicks (yes, not girls or women,) and their advice wasn't particularly helpful. I didn't have the guts to ask them why they didn't follow it, or if they did, why it didn't work for them.

In essence, they saw me as a captive audience. At least they weren't advocating anything illegal! There were varying degrees of intent. For instance, when I was thirteen, some friends told me I could do better than a certain girl that I sometimes walked home with. They had advice on how to talk to girls. It was wrong, because they were thirteen, but as we get older, there's less excuse for this sort of thing.

So how Tom turns against you is really the main thrust of this piece to me, which made it not just about romance, or whatever. It's about having someone captive, willing to listen to you, sort of like a Walter Mitty fantasy but trying to impress someone who might be beneath you, as opposed to Walter Mitty testifying against himself in the courtroom. Tom has a captive audience, and it's not just that they want to listen, but he wants them to be sure he is giving them information they couldn't get anywhere else.

And it's not just about Talking To Girls. I've certainly had my share of people told me I should be more social, but the problem is, a lot of them told me that I needed to put myself in social situations they would enjoy and I wouldn't. This was hard to articulate, and I didn't really have any proof it was the case, but fortunately I built that up over the years. I've found where I worked best. It's rewarding. Some of my "helpers" would find it weird. Tough luck for them. I'm glad I forgot some of their names. So Tom helped me take a look back at the sort of person whose advice ostensibly opens you up to new things, but all the same, it bends you away from new things you might want to and not Tom. It reminded me of people who talked me out of connecting with, well, other people I'd be a better friendship fit for. Whether or not they meant to.

Twine games are rich ground for discussing guilt trips, but I think I Got You covers new ground, because Tom genuinely is giving you a lot of advice. It's just very shallow or trivially true, or the opposite is quite silly. There's the feeling that even if you connect on a deeper level with your date, you'd owe it to Tom anyway, even though he's completely useless on that front. So "I got you" can mean a few other things: I got you all this help and this is what you do with it. Or "We're having an argument here, even if you didn't know it, and I got you." The textwall has a lot of rhetorical tricks I recognize from studying them, and in one case Tom pulls the "some people have it worse than you" card. When I sincerely got that Tom actually cares about these other people one bit. But that's how whataboutism or fast-paced argument works. In this case, as I thought through my past and the "advisors" I wasn't able to shake, I could hear Tom telling me, oh, so what if you got gaybaited in high school, why let it drag you down? You were never punched for it. Or nobody said a slur when punching you. Or they laughed and said "just joking." Or nobody waited at your house. People wind up in the hospital or dead. So don't feel too upset about a little gay baiting. (This may seem like a tangent, and it's a potential spoiler if you really want to dig into it, but ... just play. It's quicker.)

With Naked Bombs in IFComp, that makes two efforts in a row by this author that I really was able to relate to, even on the mundane level, one that looks into very G-rated needs we all have and should fulfill. Yet the setting is the sort that younger me would've been told "you're too young for that." Of course we are never too young or too (favorite adjective here) to want to belong or to share and explore ourselves and find the best people to do so with.

A title like this is meant to be catchy and a bit gonzo, and, well, it may be the best GrueScript game I've played that isn't by Robin Johnson, who created it. Not that I'm big on rating stuff, but t's pretty clear the author knew what they were doing as the writing is relatively clear and funny, with the usual ways to die that should make you laugh, and it's pretty clear what roughly to do without being duh-obvious.

The main mystery is that you have a television who doesn't like you. It just simply wants you to plug the cable in, so you can get cable channels, but that kills you. Big problem. Guess it's not just the cable fees that are brutal! To make matters worse, your girlfriend has disappeared. You want to rescue her, but you've hit some hard times lately.

The big hitch is, you have to negotiate with other machines, like a vacuum cleaner and a microwave and other things, first just to get out of your apartment and then to navigate Amanda's. The machines have their own personalities and aren't completely cooperative at first. Your vacuum needs a vacuum bag before it steps aside and takes an item of yours. Amanda's microwave needs to be cleaned. (Both of yours complain about the icky things you put in them.) Amanda's appliances are generally suspicious of you, and the telephone which misses her talking to her friends because she is calling you a lot is particularly demanding. You need to make up for what you've taken, so to speak.

What with your television able to kill you on the first move of the game when you plug the cable in, and the game title, well, it's no surprise that Amanda's disappearance/avoidance has to do with a hostile television of her own. Your apartment and hers are really quite different, but neither is terribly big, and while they have a lot of amusing squalor, there isn't a lot of already-done My Lousy Apartment stuff. The puzzles are also lampshaded, like the utility pole outside her apartment you can't climb, and having to fiddle with your TV in your apartment nicely foreshadows what you need to do with Amanda's. And since GrueScript directs you to the verbs you need, there isn't a whole lot of unnecessary fiddling, and the clicking through isn't particularly tedious. So it's well paced, and I found the climax dramatic and still pretty funny.

This was a really good entry, worthy of its long name, not one of those where it just posted on a long crazy name that makes you laugh for a few seconds and hoped it would coast on jokes you heard before. it also effectively uses the device of, well, people think you're crazy because you talk to machines, but actually you're not, without going overboard or making you yourself look or feel like an idiot. On finishing, I sort of missed the machines I had conversation with, as well as the ways the author asked, hey, how would machines they feel about their roules in a human's life? About being used too much or little? It's wise and clever and gives good laughs.

I missed the author's entries in IFComp because they felt like the sort of thing I wouldn't want to judge at the moment. On the strength of BWW, I'm quite motivated to go back and give them a look. (I planned to look at everything in the top twenty.) In BWW, you are a ghost who haunts a boarding house until someone finds your secret. This year, the guests are Lou and Amelia, and perhaps they'll be the ones to uncover your secret.

So why do you need a human to help? Because you're a ghost and can't really grab anything. You can only blow the wind, and then only on Halloween. It's 8:30 PM, so you have three and a half hours, or you would, if Lou and Amelia didn't go to bed before ten. There's a small keepsake hidden in a secret room, and it holds a secret, but you can't open it. So you're reduced to making stuff fall over or making a clock chime. Each thing gets different reactions from the humans. You need to lead them to certain rooms, too, before critical actions.

It's not a very huge house, but it doesn't need to be, and while I'd play a bigger version, I enjoyed not having to do a whole ton of things. Manipulating The Lodgers is not too hard, and it's pretty clear what works and doesn't. There's no time, but rather, them seeing they're a bit tired and then going to bed, and then you miss your chance on Halloween. To finally break the loop. There are a few things to do in order, which I don't want to spoil, and since it's not a very big game, you won't lose much if you run out of time. In fact, the ending where you lose makes the winning ending feel more satisfying once you get it right. But the story makes a lot of sense either way. I missed the best ending the first time through, got it the second, and then revisited a location outside the house with my third. (I was more confident where to go, in what order. The right ending fully validates the title, but seeing everywhere clinches things.)

So it's a really good use of choice script, which may seem a bit hard with the 4-hour time limits, but it doesn't worry about stuff like player stats, which would muddy up the story here.

This isn't the first story of investigating your death or manipulating people who are still alive, but it reminded me of Caelyn Sandel's Light My Way Home. They are similar length, but LMWH is a parser game. In that, you're incorporeal being that acts on machines, not people. So it's really cool to see how these two take a basic premise in very different directions and do so very well.

Oz the Great and Terrible (OGT) is a nice cute bitsy game if you don't read the text, and it's a funny subversive one if you do. The plot loosely follows The Wizard of Oz. You drop from the sky and find the Wicked Witch of the West buried under a house. As in the book and movie. The munchkins are oppressed, too, by the Wizard of Oz. Your goal is to find your dog Toto whom you lost.

I counted ten rooms on the main path, with ten off to the side. This didn't include the informational start and end rooms. So it's a pretty good size, with no risk of losing your way. Your friend the Scarecrow, Lion and Tin Man make an appearance, too, but it's in different circumstances, and it's not quite the companion story of the book. You need to do something for each of them before you can pass by. Once you do, the wizard beyond the emerald gates will give you your dog back.

Along the way are munchkins. A lot of munchkins. They relate to you what the wizard is doing, or what sort of animals are attacking them. There's almost a weird truce and balance between the wizards damage and the animals. And there are funny terrible scenes where you see a munchkin lying on its side in a field, and you find out why, or there is a small camping area where they are scared to make a fire. There's a cemetery, too, near the start. I almost missed it, but I'm glad I didn't when I tracked back to make sure I wasn't misssing something. Some of the scary bits are laid out clearly, but some imply certain things, and coming to that realization hits effectively. There's a bit of humor, too, especially when you try to take more brains than you need to in one place.

The graphics are a bit different than the usual bitsy game, which usually have wide open areas for when you can move to the next screen. Here, you're following the yellow brick road, as in the book, so you learn to follow paths and not open areas. The start is purplish, and the ending is green. (The empty spaces are black, naturally. Desolation and all that.) The color shifts help compartmentalize things into beginning, middle, and end. OGT also uses flashing rainbow text for dialogue, which was probably intended to be small neat cute harmless fun, but it adds a bit of spookiness here.

I'm generally a bit leery of remakes of classic literature, as I'm worried the author may just be relying too much on the original thing. Here, it's a really clever and fun take. I got a bit confused as to what to do in the end, as I think I needed to take the brains twice at the beginning and maybe visit all the rooms, so that was a bit confusing. But I would gladly play it again to figure out the details. It's funny and attractively presented.

Costumes and Candy is about what you'd expect, given the title and the competition it's in. And it really hits the mark for me, with a balance of adult wisdom and nostalgia. It's got several different mini games beneath the strategy of getting to all the houses in the neighborhood and maximizing your candy to defeat Shawn, the rich bully with a much more expensive costume than yours. Which you like, of course. But bullies are bullies, and this sort of thing is maddening when you're young.

There's a lot of flavor text as you go walking around. You have a choice between saying TRICK OR TREAT or, well, being a bit rude -- or in some cases, asking adults what's up. This reminded me of how I was told to behave, and in this case, there's obvious incentive to (adults don't like jerk kids,) so it's not even close to a perfect moral lesson. But I certainly remember thinking "I'll get what I want if polite, Halloween or no." It was good not to have to worry about ethical nuance. Simpler times!

There are also fun little dialogues as you walk between houses, and some link up or describe what you get from other houses. And there's a mini maze that's fun and wouldn't be fun if you were an adult. There's another game besides the maze that I don't want to spoil, because it's the sort of thing I'd have loved to do. Some adults let you in their house, and don't worry, they're safe! Others have, well, problems, or they even forgot to put out treats, and you can help them, maybe not perfectly ethically, but hey, it's just a fun game. And they wind up glad they "remembered."

C&C has replay value because you can figure where you didn't quite do what you could have. Or you can see what happens when you're a jerk. I got 96 out of 100 points. But I still had that "aw shucks I missed some candy feeling" from the kid inside me, when I didn't have time to visit all the houses or whatever. I remember strategizing too as well in the neighborhood, and how I would vow to get more next year once I was stronger and faster and had more endurance.

There are a lot of neat jokes in the writing but one caught my eye as a sports fan. The author, more often than not, has one of these very random ones that fit perfectly in each game he writes. A former athlete named (Spoiler - click to show)Jim Elbow, whose name is a mashup of (Spoiler - click to show)John Elway and Tim Tebow, lives in your neighborhood. The name feels like something even non-sports fans can enjoy.

The only weakness may be the lack of a map (or one apparent -- I couldn't find one.) It's your neighborhood, so you roughly know the way around.

I will be playing through as a jerk to see what happens. I didn't want to at first, because I was caught up in the fun. But then I will be sure to try a 100% run, so I can beat Shawn in a best two of three. He deserves it.