Reviews by Tabitha

I played Not Just Once back when it was first released and enjoyed it then, but encountered a few bugs. Having just played the updated version, I’m happy to report that my experience this time around was bug-free! Both on my original playthrough and again today, I found it quite compelling from the get-go; there’s a very moody vibe to it as the PC walks home in the snow on a January evening, preparing to eat a sad corner-store meal, and soon it takes a mysterious and somewhat spooky turn. (I found myself reading parts of it in the voice of Jonathan Sims from The Magnus Archives, which was delightful.)

Early in the game, the choices are about characterizing the PC—do you find Christmas lights still up in January charming, or irritating? What type of ostentatious shoes are your favorite? (Later, there’s also an appearance customization section, but it subverts expectations in several ways; clicking “skin color” does not actually allow you to choose a skin color, and the things you do get to choose have an immediate, very effective payoff.) We’re never told much about the PC outright; there are hints at your past, and apparently you knew going into it that today would be difficult, but the reason why, whatever happened prior to the game’s start, is never revealed.

Players also get to help shape the PC’s reality in an interesting way, going beyond looks or fashion choices. When a stranger tells the PC the two of you have met before, you get to choose if she seems familiar or not, and whether or not it’s possible that you had the encounter she describes. For these reasons, I felt somewhat distanced from the PC the whole time, like I was co-crafting them more than playing them, but that wasn’t a bad thing; having all these different options made it feel like the game was full of possibilities, and I was eager to explore them.

After playing several times, I definitely have a favorite ending, one that felt most fitting with the game as a whole. Multiple times throughout you’re given the choice to pursue/continue your odd encounter or give up and just head home, and continuing was the most rewarding to me; heading home (alone) at any point feels like it cuts the game off early, and leads to an ending I found less satisfying than what I consider the “main” one.

Two minor mechanical things—this is a stretch-text Twine game without an auto-scroll function, so constantly having to scroll down after clicking a choice was a bit annoying. The other is that the game doesn’t properly restart if you click the “end” link, which returns you to the beginning screen, and then click “start” again; if you do this, the game still remembers the appearance choices from your prior playthrough, and you don’t get to pick new ones. To fully clear the slate and start fresh, you have to click the “restart” icon. But these are small complaints about an overall rich, intriguing game!

The problem with hype is that it raises your expectations, and when the hyped thing fails to meet those expectations, it inhibits your enjoyment in a way you wouldn't have experienced if you'd gone in without those unfairly high hopes. I've experienced this with a lot of popular IF works, not just this one, so it's definitely more me than the game--and it was a very good game! The completely alien perspective, positioning humanity as foreign, is narrated in rich language that uses common English words in never-before-written ways and was compelling and lovely to read. The horror elements were well done, understated in their matter-of-factness, which made them all the more horrifying. Contrasted with this, the beauty of the Song, of the alien world, of the bond that forms between alien and human--it all makes for an excellent story.

But I think I might have enjoyed it more if it were a story alone, a work of static fiction rather than a game. The whole time I felt like I was being guided through an on-rails experience, always nudged in the correct next direction, not encouraged to experiment or take my time. While I appreciate the game's helpfulness in keeping players on the right track, allaying potential frustration, what I enjoy most about parser games tends to be the exploration and experimentation that the form typically encourages. Coloratura held my hand a bit too much for my liking; I would have preferred a little more freedom.

This is a brief excerpt from a longer work-in-progress that packs a lot into its short space. We, the readers, watch the scene unfold in third person as two long-separated men reunite in a confessional booth. Their dialogue has script-like formatting, most of the work a conversation with brief pauses for description. Said description paints a vivid picture of the two, deftly characterizing them through both their appearances and actions. We’re told none of either one’s backstory or their shared history, but are left to infer it based on their conversation, which is sufficient to provide a strong sense of who each is—Andrey, charming and flippant; Joel, earnest and emotional—and why this reunion matters to them.

The religious aspect is well-employed, both to hint at what drove them apart—Joel is a priest, while Andrey has lost his faith—and to serve as an analogy. The work’s title is taken from a Catholic prayer, which when excerpted at the end is cast in a new light by what we’ve just seen play out. A hint of sacrilege, delightful in the deep meaning it gives their relationship.

There are no choices in the piece; the reader simply clicks a link on each page to continue, with the short length of the pages encouraging you to linger on each, taking in the richness of the writing, processing each beat of this emotionally fraught moment as it unfolds.

I enjoy this sort of item-gathering optimization game (someone on IFDB has dubbed the genre “Verdeterrelike”), and I had fun with this one! A brief introduction explains that you’re at this museum to steal the famous “Mon Alicia” and then grab as many additional items as you can in the next 10 minutes before you leave. Like other Verdeterrelikes, it’s meant to be replayed multiple times, so on my initial playthrough I took my time examining everything I encountered, exploring the museum to see how big it was and understand the layout (ADRIFT’s automapper was helpful for this, although not strictly necessary as the map is quite simple).

Every action you perform takes 15 seconds, and you’ll need to be efficient if you want to maximize your score. Acquiring all the items requires solving small puzzles revolving around access and transportation. If time runs out before you’ve manually escaped, the game has you escape automatically—at the cost of dropping everything you’re carrying. So you have to make sure you leave enough time to go through the departure steps after grabbing your items. A single playthrough is quite quick, and I was sufficiently motivated to replay many times in order to keep increasing my take (ultimately hitting $681 million, which I was happy enough with despite knowing a higher score is possible).

The game was made over a brief time period, which shows a bit as there are some rough edges that could be smoothed out. Every turn takes 15 seconds, whether you successfully perform an action or not—so typos and commands that don’t work will cost you as much time as anything else. I also encountered a bug in one playthrough where I was able to do an action I don’t think was supposed to work ((Spoiler - click to show)pushing the Corvette Stone into an adjacent room without the wheelbarrow), because when I tried the same thing in subsequent playthroughs I was told it wasn’t possible. Still, for anyone looking for a quick little optimization puzzler, I recommend checking this one out!

This game was written for the 2022 Goncharov Game Jam. While I am 100% out of the loop on the Goncharov meme, beyond knowing it exists, that fortunately didn’t stop me from comprehending or enjoying this short game. You play as Sofia, whose backstory remains largely a mystery beyond her being under the thumb of a mob boss. Tasked with getting information out of Katya, the wife of Goncharov (said boss’s rival mobster), at a party, Sofia studies and chats with her but is ultimately left with more questions than answers.

Throughout the game, optional links provide more information on people or situations mentioned with brief, evocative descriptions. The choices that exist are which dialogue options you say to Katya, ranging from flirtatious to apologetic, direct to subtle. Which you choose will determine in part the content and tenor of your conversation, especially its ending. I enjoyed replaying to see the different possibilities and gain a little more insight into Katya each time, seeing her and Sofia connect, however briefly, in different ways. In one variation, a line from Katya directly alludes to the title: “This isn’t our story, Sofia.” But while these women may be on the periphery of men’s rivalry and violence, the game itself centers their experience, with Goncharov never making an appearance. Well-written and compelling, this is an excellent little bite of a game—like Sofia, I’m left wanting more.

I like to write reviews for old(er) games when there's something that strikes me about the game that isn't mentioned in other reviews. In this case, it's that (Spoiler - click to show)there's more than one way to solve it! Everyone you encounter wants something, and if you can provide them with what they want, they'll give you something in return. But (Spoiler - click to show)for most of the items, there isn't just one correct person to give it to--two different people will be happy to take it, each providing a different item in return. I've encountered new items on each one of my three playthroughs, and discovered that there are even two possible different heads you can provide to the Duc!

Having (Spoiler - click to show)multiple possible solutions like this, leading to different item exchanges and character interactions, is clever and adds replay value. But even more impressive to me is the consistent state-tracking, with small details of the descriptions changing based on what you've done, and every character having a specific remark for whatever nasty item you're currently carrying around. Truly an excellently designed game.

The first thing that struck me about this game was the UI. It’s gorgeous! The softly textured main background, the handwriting fonts (with choices so you can pick one that you find most readable), the paper-like background for the text. It’s the perfect aesthetic for the story; there’s even a little quill you click to continue!

The story itself has a compelling start, with Isabelle having suddenly had to leave her home and return to the village she thought she’d left forever, now separated from her lover, Olympia, and pouring out her longing for reunion in her letters. What exactly happened is revealed slowly in bits and pieces (although on a second replay, when I chose a different option early on, I found that the explanation came together more quickly), and it was satisfying to put the pieces together, figuring out Isabelle’s background and why she had to suddenly leave the city.

Sometimes I didn’t feel like I was entirely following the ups and downs of the relationship as time and Isabelle’s letters went on, as we only get Isabelle’s side of the correspondence, but the tension between the two, the strain that the inciting incident and the distance was putting on their relationship—the way the distance allowed mistrust and suspicions to creep in, both jumping to conclusions about each other—was gripping to read and made me invested in the conclusion. I was less interested in the external plot going on around Isabelle, though, and because the ending focused in on that plotline, it fell a little flat for me.

Two other notes, first on the interactivity. I can’t help but compare this to other epistolary IF works I’ve played, and unlike in First Draft of the Revolution or Something Blue, in DJL the player/protagonist isn’t choosing what pieces of information to share with Olympia, or what spin to put on them; rather, you’re deciding which of the offered choices is actually true. Or at least, that was my interpretation after multiple playthroughs, and I felt almost like this gave me too much power over the story; things that felt like small choices in the moment ended up being major shapers of the way events played out, in ways I wasn’t prepared for.

Finally, I know this was translated from French under a time crunch, and that showed a bit, with some confusing phrasing or word mix-ups. This wasn’t a major distraction, but it made the reading experience a bit bumpy at times and created another barrier to my feeling like I’d fully grasped everything. I’m glad the translation was finished in time for Spring Thing, though, as I enjoyed the story and had fun playing through it!

I was drawn into this one by the stylish UI and the character-focused setup, immediately interested in our three MCs’ circumstances and their relationship. Their teasing, comfortable dynamic was fun to read about, especially with the sense that these were some precious, stolen moments in an otherwise strictly regimented life. However, the introduction to these characters’ lives doesn’t match up with what actually plays out in the story; the setup gets quickly got thrown out the window, especially when the cozy domestic moment we start out witnessing becomes an urgent mission.

As other reviews have mentioned, I think the confusion definitely comes in part from this being the third in a series. Not having played the preceding games, I couldn’t follow what was going on with the mission, completely lacking a frame of reference for it. This ended up creating a major disconnect between me and the characters, which was the opposite of my experience at the beginning, when I thought I understood what they might be thinking and feeling.

A final issue is that most of the game’s passages contain two types of links—ones that lead to brief asides and return you to the passage you came from when you're done, and ones that advance to the next main-text passage. However, both types of links are colored and styled exactly the same, and the game has no “back” button, meaning that if you inadvertently miss an aside, there’s no way to rewind and see it. While I was able to crack the code as to which type of link is which—single-word links are asides, multi-word links advance—signaling the difference in a more obvious way would have been a better design choice.

This is a cute game! I've never played a game with an octopus PC before, and my favorite aspect was the descriptions, which paint such delightful pictures as an octopus snuggled up in a drawer full of sweaters and an octopus sitting on a window ledge high above the city. "You're splayed out on the hardwood floor" is just perfect too. I also thought the plot was well done; your goal is to get your owner to move back out of her boyfriend's apartment, and I wondered how I might possibly accomplish that until it became clear that (Spoiler - click to show)her boyfriend is cheating on her, and thus my goal was to expose him.

I did have some struggles, mostly notably with the faucets as Mike already pointed out in his review. I also thought (Spoiler - click to show)opening the window latch with the plunger was a bit far-fetched; I don't think that would actually work IRL, and from the setup described I would have thought my arms would be able to reach it without issue. (Also, minor quibble, but octopus' limbs are actually arms, not tentacles!) It also got a bit old having to return to my tank every so often--I liked the realism of this, but I wish the game would've had me automatically drop everything I was carrying when I tried to get in, so that I wouldn't have had to type "enter tank. drop all. enter tank."

I had a little trouble with the endgame, too. Partly because I had completely failed to (Spoiler - click to show)examine myself in detail, so I missed that I could squirt ink until I turned to the hints for help with the clothesline--that one's definitely on me. But I also had to use the tip from Mike's review for getting the winning ending; (Spoiler - click to show)having to close the bottom drawer seemed pretty unintuitive, and I wasn't sure why it mattered that I was out of my tank at that point---I would have thought the presence of a stranger's underwear would take precedence. So overall I found it an enjoyable little game, just with a few hiccups along the way.

This was another game that had me quite confused at first—I couldn't for the life of me understand what I was supposed to be doing (Spoiler - click to show)if I couldn't use verbs! After some flailing I turned to the in-game hints, which fortunately clearly explained what was going on. From that point on it became a fun and unique little exercise. It's got an unusual parser game mechanic, and I'm impressed by the coding it must have taken to make it all work. The story was cute too; I liked the reveal and that there were multiple possible endings.

A downside is that it was very short—by the time I felt like I’d gotten the hang of the mechanic and was gearing up to do more complex things with it, the game was over! So it felt a bit more like a proof of concept than a full game, but if the author ever did make a longer game with this conceit, I would be first in line to play.