Reviews by Andrew Schultz

Lulu and the Asteroid of 100% guaranteed Doom starts out giving a very cute first impression. I mean, of course, there's the title, but there's also Lulu the cat following you around royally, especially for a cat. Well, okay, the tutorial has you feed her among other things at the start (it's done rather well--a variety of relatively simple things and make sure that you have them nailed down and even a mention that you can abbreviate some commands) but it gives the impression of a "my house with an adventure with a silly twist later" sort of thing. Also, I thought it was well-done how the two things you found in the fridge are used in almost opposite ways to deal with NPCs you meet.

There's nothing too difficult in Lulu, as you find out about the asteroid that's likely to strike the Earth, and worse, Lulu finds a new crack in your basement and ... jumps in. Hearing no THUD, you investigate. And from here the map sprawls a bit. Certainly when I looked at it, I was intimidated. Was this really a good fit for TALP? Well, it worked out okay in the end, but I can see how people may be put off. There is a big reveal at the end, and there's a story to go with. The main reason I was able to figure what to do was, I'd find a blocker and look at my inventory and realize, okay, item X in my inventory needs to do something.

The puzzles are wide-ranging, though I'm not sure if they really cohere. In general you look to find nonviolent solutions to get past bad guys, and you also want to help the good guys. For instance, you rescue a rabid merchant from a dog, and they help you fix an item, which you use to sort-of befriend but eventually dismantle another villain. Which is cute, but then there's a logic puzzle that gives a few clues to ask how to rank which metals go in which forges, from warm to super-hot. It's an odd swerve, and it feels a bit like busy work. The in-game graphics also didn't gel for me. I think they were generated by AI, and they give the feel of trying to be impressive, except the game's tone is not impressive, especially with some of the sillier puzzles. While things do take a serious turn with spells you need, the melodrama in the image distracted me from the writing, and from other concerns, like "Why does Lulu disappearing for stretches?" I mean, beyond moving the plot along to make you explore the map and find her. Some of this is rather cute, where she is cowering in fear. The full in-world reason explained at the end, and I found it adequate. In the meantime she helps you in a few combats.

So Lulu is not perfect but I'm a bit surprised it placed as low as it did, even if there were strong games ahead of it, and the rating gap between it and the entry below it was higher than it and what was above. At times it goes together smoothly, and other times it feels a bit helter-skelter. Yet it's relatively welcoming, and I enjoyed the time I spent with it, even if I needed a map the second time through to make it through quickly and check off on things for this review.

One Sierra game I remember fondly is Mixed-Up Mother Goose. It simply puts a bunch of items in random places around a sixteen-room map, and you must reunite them with their owners. It's replayable because of the randomness. The graphics are cutesy. So when I saw WKMG I expected something like this, what with the last two words of the title being the same. Of course, the first two words may suggest entirely different plots. You, as grown-up Jack Horner, are tasked with finding who kidnapped Mother Goose. (Well, everyone else is too preoccupied.) As you explore the town, you learn stuff about the other subjects of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. For the most part, life hasn't been very kind to them, and there are a good deal of jokes. Most of them land, and it reminded me favorably of the novelty song I heard on Dr. Demento called Charliesomething, where the singer acts as Charlie Brown, all grown up, with all the Peanuts characters running into troubles of their own.

WKMG's not a huge game. The map is beginner-friendly: a north-south street with houses or businesses on each side, and some dwellings have a back room or backyard. But it's big enough, with enough characters, you do feel you've searched high and low by the time you find Mother Goose. (You'll know where she is. You just can't get there right away. It definitely gives you something to pull for.) The detective work is pretty satisfying, as is examining side stuff not needed for your quest. David Welbourn's walkthrough covers a lot of this and gave me a lot more to see than my original run through, where I was just trying to win. There's some riffing on how you are just straight up walking into people's houses, and with Wee Willie Winkie there's the problem of getting his attention without him kicking you out. There's not a whole lot of nostalgia here, which suits me fine -- I was never a big fan of the fairy tales so I'm glad they're not held up in reverence, and the funniest bit for me was learning to distract the kids from a fountain where you yourself want to go fishing for coins.

The puzzles to outwit the ogre and troll are also worthy -- while there are some timed puzzles, it's pretty obviously they're going to BE timed. And the kidnapper's lair outside of town is well designed. I have to admit, the first time through, I was wondering who it could be and suspecting the subject of a nursery rhyme I maybe forgot.

The only real criticism I have is that the humor can be rather blunt. Nothing mean, just everyone is living in squalor an there's the fear it might get old. (It doesn't, with the game at a manageable size.) That and other things speak to good game design. For instance, the tutorial has you look at a coat you find, then wear it, then take it off. The coat is important later.

I'm amused comparing WKMG to The Wolf, another entry in TALP 2024, which had a fairy tale theme. WKMG has everything except wolves, and The Wolf is about the Big Bad Wolf. But they both turn the fairy tales they look at on their heads with, I think, good results. There's a mystery in each, of sorts, though one narrator/main character is more reliable.

Nothing can make me nostalgic for nursery rhymes, but I enjoyed how WKMG kicks them when they're down a bit (or lets me feel it is) while adding a solid murder mystery. It shouldn't be too hard, but if you get stuck, there are rhyming couplets as hints, which is a nice touch that made me feel I wasn't just begging for help.

When you think of minotaurs, you think of mazes, which generally aren't a great thing in text adventures--and probably not what you want to expose new players to in a jam like TALP! But one thing about mazes in text adventures is, there are so many good ways to subvert them. We're still finding good ones.

LatM, thouugh it takes place in a maze, doesn't focus you on getting out. The real problem is removing four obstacles to the exit. It also focuses on the relationship between you, as Lysidice, and the Minotaur Achilles has injured grievously--your first task is to find the ingredients of a potion that will heal him. LatM gives progressive hints, making it playable even for experienced text adventurers, even spoiling the way out early on for observant adventures. Well, the directions out. There are gates and a chasm to cross. None of these puzzles is super-esoteric, either, but they're satisfying. And I think the interplay between Lysidice and the Minotaur works well. You only play as her, as she figures what to do and talks to NPCs, and the Minotaur, though injured, provides the muscle and even grunts out what passes for yesses and nos for minor hints, so you know if you're on the right track without full spoilers.

The NPCs range from generic animals to characters in Greek mythology. One of them asks you to find two items, which are related to another myth that ends tragically, and knowing this left me sad and slightly amused. There's another moment where you run into another woman trapped in the maze, but you may freak her out, and finding why is rather neat. One item had me thinking its possibilities, which I forgot by the time I got near the end For many of the puzzles, you can guess what you need to do, though there's enough misdirection to keep things fresh. The third gate you face, you think, oh no, another key. Except it's not.

LatM also has a lot of nice aesthetic touches beyond just coloring nouns or verbs you need to use, like changing the blinking yellow rectangle "press any key" cursor to a golden spiral, which matches the text and gives the game a nice ancient feel. So it uses Adventuron well. It also has a robust out-of-world hint base. The ending also slightly varies based on if you explored the side rooms, which I found worth it. And I also found genuine tension over whether the Minotaur would heal fully or maybe even die. I won't spoil it, because I'd like to encourage you to play LatM, if you haven't.

Note from an author's perspective: I've found the author's games make a welcoming enough experience that I often say "You know, that's something I could've/should've taken the time to do." Maybe something not completely obvious, but worth it to give the player their best chance to figure what you want them to do, not only to win the game, but see its secrets. Here I had a clear path to the end after solving the last obstacle, but I didn't want to leave right away, with more rooms to explore.

The name Camelot Jack brings up, perhaps, President John F Kennedy for those of us who live in america. It's a good solid title without that, because we have an idea of what fairy tales get mashed up, namely Jack and the Beanstalk and Camelot with King Arthur. But unfortunately, the homebrew parser gets in the way of the author's ideas, and we're left with some minor laughs about how the author had trouble getting stuff done, and they try their best, really, but things never take off, even if the puzzles presented are a nice short jaunt to try and leave a prison. The author seems to have gotten the scope right, but CJ isn't really a good fit for the competition, as it feels more like "my first parser game as an author" than "let me help you play your first parser game."

The layout is impressive, with buttons to push for common parser commands. And having Swordy, your sword, help you along in the all-too-brief tutorial helps to not take things too seriously and forgive some rough bits. But it's also hard to do simple things like take inventory or even go north. While clear GUI is nice, though, CJ doesn't understand abbreviations like I for Inventory. NORTH gives "I know not this north of which you speak." So the humor does try a bit too hard.

Nevertheless, sitting down with a walkthrough and going through (going off course may make the game unwinnable,) provides a smile or two, and by the end, you see what the author was getting at, but it could probably have used more testing. You probably know what to do with cheese if you've been an adventure before, so that's good for beginners, and there's a neat little main puzzle where you have to choose between three trapped containers, and one item that didn't seem handy comes in handy, and it makes sense, and you feel clever outsmarting an NPC. This is something to build on. Once you win, you don't really win, but you get a message that the author had hoped to do more. They definitely can one day, as the GUI is impressive here and shows the author knows what he's doing, but the competition really isn't focused on that sort of convenience.

While many of the entries in the TALP 2024 took the more classic Western fairy tale approach, Bakemono no Sekai went in a different direction, with Japanese fairy tales, and it served as a sort of double tutorial for Japanese folk tales, culture and terminology, as well as text adventures. I don't particularly need the second, but I was glad to have the first. I'd heard a lot of the terms off and on, but here I had sort of a chance to ask about them and interact with them, via an NPC and a book in the library. People interested in Japan on the Internet get a bad rap, rightfully or not, but this was straightforward and did not drown me in information. Just small additional descriptions where needed. It kept the focus on what I might want to know, not what it id.

Although you have mythical beasts to kill, it's a relaxed affair, as they're not the super powerful type. They're more the sword born out of people's fears, who just annoy them and distract them from doing what they really want. But there's something odd going on here, because they don't just vanish, but they leave behind a sort of black powder. I was able to guess what that black powder was, and I feel smart about this, though I may not have seen the full ending. The game revolves around you solving this mystery, and there isn't a whole lot of abstract stuff to do, but there's enough. You have a notepad with tracks down things you need to ask about, and later you find a book at a library that tells you about it.

About the only real puzzle is finding money to buy stuff at a shop, and you only need to find one coin to buy three or four things. There's also a puzzle about finding light, but it's relatively trivial. it does involve blowing past the game's warning saying, "Oh, sure, you can search something if you want, why not?" So maybe that's a bit artificial, but there aren't a whole lot of false trails, so you probably will say, okay, I might as well look.

PunyInform seems like a good tool for this. I don't want too much too fast at me, and this felt about right, giving twelve or so things to ask about at the start and pushing you forward once you've asked eight. You can't leave your house until you do, and then you go to town and discover a library which offers more information. Along the way you pick up some items which seem like they'll be useful, and you're not sure how, but removing the curse has a small ritual which I also found effective.

Games about Japanese culture have a bad rap, based on the sort of stereotypical person who like them, but this and others that I've played via comps has turned out very well. I'm not surprised this did well in the TALP contest. There aren't any big tricks or bends in the map, but it is big enough that you do feel you're walking through a town and its outskirts, and the few puzzles you need to figure are satisfying while not crushingly difficult. One final thing: I didn't know enough to be fully moved by the twist at the end, only recognizing some of the terms, but I was still able to stand back a bit and say it was nicely done.

Sometimes you just look for an author you're pretty sure you'll like, to make a good start in reviewing a comp. Leo Weinreb in was my choice for TALP 2024. He wrote A Walk Around the Neighborhood, which had the really clever device of talking to your significant other, who calls out progressive hints exasperatedly from the next room over. And your friend Tonya helps you with the verbs you'll need to complete the game, even with a tweak for if you toggle the tutorial after it's over. It's the sort of humor that jibes with me. So this all jibes well with TALP/TALJ's purpose.

And about the only problem I had was, The Wolf felt generic as a title. The main character, however, is quickly revealed as definitely not a bore, for better or worse! The Wolf spins together several fairy tales everyone knows and probably doesn't want or need to hear again, at least as a stand-alone, and the result is a pretty snappy game that makes those old stories new.

You're a wolf, see, and you just aren't the violent type. Honest! But still, you're in the police station, undergoing questioning for several murders. If you-the-reader know your fairy tales, you can guess most of them.

But you're not a murderer. So you say. You're a building inspector (how freelance your role is, is not revealed,) and boy do you like to capitalize on any pretext whatsoever to go inspecting buildings. It's not that easy, though. People don't let you in.

It's a slightly absurd assumption, but then, these are fairy tales, and it pulls them together well. There's a shepherd boy who will call you out, a girl with a red hood, and three pigs. There's a fisherman, too, and I confess I blanked on the reference. But it added nicely to the story.

I think the pigs puzzle was particularly clever and fun. The first house is easy to blow down, but the second needs a little work, and you need trickery to enter the third.

*The Wolf* does a great job of following the constraints of the comp and using them to sharpen its focus into something funny, the sort of simple but effective twist on a premise I as an author am a bit jealous when other people find. No "Oh, I'm reimagining fairy tales and passing it off as my own stuff" here. The wolf is a delightfully shifty character, and I found myself almost wanting to believe it, not just because I played through as the wolf, who's ostensibly made a lot of trouble, but because the natural human inclination is to believe an exciting lie over a boring truth. And I've been in my own situations where I felt weird explaining myself, and I was innocent, honest I was. The end result is an almost plausible story, one certainly more believable than the fairy tales that feel run-down when referred to the Xth time.

So there's that humor there but the reminder, too, that we do love to be suckered in by a good story. While some of the text described disturbing things, the humor meant that it wasn't until I looked back on things that I thought of that angle, how we can believe people we dislike if they just have a good exciting story. It's both disturbing and funny, thoughtful and full of action.

(Originally written during TALP 2024, touched up during TALP 2025.)

I sometimes wondered as a kid if my life would be radically different if I, say, chose one flavor of ice cream over another one day. The Butterfly effect and all that.

Well, that sort of happens here.

You are driving to work, and you stop at a gas station to refuel. You have a choice of four snacks to buy. Each one opens a different mini-story, and each mini-story gives you part of a message you need to decipher. Once I solved two of the stories, I had enough of the message to decipher it. I don't know if it's the author's intent, but it's a neat idea. And the snack images are neat low-res things that give me nostalgia for Apple and TRS-80, in a good way.

There are some puzzles, too, mostly of the logic type. There's "three people, one may be lying" and numerical patterns and so forth. I got talking animals in a forest and then an elevator where the desired floor was the answer to a puzzle. I missed on the animals in the forest several times, but it was forgiving and looped back until I examined stuff and figured things out.

This means Day Out isn't big on story, but technically, it works. However, it seems as though it would work a lot better in Twine, and the author may have confused "tutorial for others" with "tutorial for myself." The verbs are sensible but they are force-fed to you. So it's not great on teaching the player what to try first, and what to expect from their tries.

Part of this may be because English isn't the author's first language. I googled their name, since it was relatively unique, and their artistic side is rather interesting, at least on Instagram. It jibes with what I saw, where you had interesting whimsical drawings, and it's good to see someone with a large Instagram following move over here. The interlinking stories and secret messages are creative, if a bit random. For instance, with the elevator buttons, PUSH RED/GREEN/BLUE could just have three buttons to click, saving keystrokes. So it doesn't really play to the strengths of the parser, especially when I typed BLUE. Thankfully the HINT command bailed me out. So the author made serious effort to make things robust, though Adventuron may not have been the best tool for the job, especially since Twine allows graphics at least as easily too.

There was enough of that that my usual "I couldn't write something in another language" caveats and praise for courage aren't just fluff. There are spelling and grammar errors, but it's not the sort a native speaker would make, and when you see those it's easy/easier to be forgiving. I was definitely left thinking, okay, this person did what they could, and with more time to proofread and translate, this gets ironed out, no problem. I mean, you get a password just before the puzzles start, which is thoughtful of the author, and the passwords are rather amusing on their own. The author has a legit sense of humor, as I found by playing theie 2025 TALJ entry.

Though between checking off to say, yes, this is what the author meant, and fighting the parser a bit to get to the "good" ending, I was glad to cut things short initially. Guessing the "real" path through is hinted at several times in the story and leads you to a fun small sub-game of its own, which has almost certainly been done before, but it's satisfying.

This points to good and bad: I needed a break after the two times through, but I was interested in eating the other two snacks before judging ended, for more than just completionist purposes.

Day Out does provide fun but also has weaknesses: it does feel like puzzles with story slapped on a bit (I've definitely been in that boat, too, as a writer,) but I did like the blocky way-retro graphics, and I don't think that sort of aesthetic appeal happens by accident. But the game also has limitations, because the parser inhibits the experience instead of adding to it. However, if it weren't written in Adventuron, we might not have the cool graphics Adventuron seems to inspire. So Day Out may not be a great fit for the jam, possibly due to some misunderstandings, but it's still fun if you have guardrails. The author for his part seems to have made a parser game that would be trickier to do in Twine for TALP/TALJ 2025. The tutorial feels more fleshed out. But looking back on Day Out, it does have a rough "shows potential" charm, and the author built on this potential.

BaB is certainly a catchy title: two words beginning with the same two letters, not obviously related, but you get to wonder how or why they might be. It also foreshadows that some of the puzzles will be surreal and silly, and they are, but they don't feel forced.

And it works quite well, as a father-and-son collaboration. We've seen them before, and I think that sort of cooperation works well for instructional games. The child doesn't understand coding yet but has an idea of what they want to create, and the adult maybe understands coding but is frustrated they don't have any cool ideas, or maybe they've forgotten one from the past. So the adult in essence gives a tutorial to the child, and then they collaborate on what to give to the player. So there's always a checkpoint of "why are you doing this" that the developers have to pass, and doing so makes things clearer to the reader. And these games are generally quite fun, as even if there is a hole in them, we think, well, I'd have been proud to write something almost this good when I was younger. Or have someone help me. Or, well, help my kids if I had them.

And it is a really good fit for the competition, too. You are Hermes, and your first task is to find two sandals that will help you fly around to deliver a letter to Zeus. Of course, it's for him, so you'd better not read it. I like this sort of riff on mythology. This groundedness reminds me of that passage in Amadeus where Mozart says "Come on now, be honest! Which one of you wouldn't rather listen to his hairdresser than Hercules? Or Horatius, or Orpheus ..." The next bit, while amusing, is not kid-friendly.

Delivering the letter runs into problems, of course. A flash storm lands you on an island where you solve some puzzles that feel standard for text adventures. They're mostly GIVE X TO Y type puzzles. There are hints, and you can evebn CALL ZEUS if you get stuck. A minotaur blocks your way, and of course, you need to figure what to do with the basilisk. If you know your mythology, you'll have a good idea, but I thought the fight was well-done as it used Adventuron's graphic features effectively. It just felt like the sort of coding project that's perfect for a kid but satisfying to solve at the end, especially in a comp where instadeaths should only happen if the player really, really tries.

The hand-drawn pictures are pleasant, too, and that's always a nice feature of Adventuron. They're whimsical without feeling lazy, and for me, seeing the room change when you take an item never gets old. Perhaps there's a part of Young Andrew who's still wowed at how Sierra did it and how it's easy to do now. That part of me is also wowed that you can change the font from Sans Serif to an ancient Greek style with FONT in BaB. Yes, even though I've known about fonts for 25 years now. There's still magic in there. Maybe it's the Inform programmer in me, who is generally just happy to use bold and italics. But I like these small aesthetic touches that maybe can be done just as easily in CSS, but it's cool a text adventure language lets you do something with a wave of your hand.

Overall, the silliness works without overwhelming. You always know what you need to find, both the enemy and an item. But that also got me in a bit of a problem. The game encourages you to look everywhere, and I had a tough time at first finding the banana because (Spoiler - click to show)bananas grow in tropical climates, and you find one in some snow. Perhaps I’m at fault for overthinking or not lawnmowering as diligently as I should.

Any absurdity you may have worried about is explained at the end as you wind up meeting a few more mythical beasts. Adults may guess the misdirection here. I've seen it in other games. But I think it worked very nicely, despite my knowing, like a surprise party you know is going to happen, but the recipient deserves it.

BaB felt like a near perfect fit for the competition and one of the most replayable. There were some cases where I hit on solutions and got whisked to the next room before I poked at everything I wanted to, which is one of Adventuron's foibles, but hey, TALP games should push you forward quickly to encourage you when you do things right.

(This review was originally written in May 2024 during the jam. I edited it post-comp.)