Reviews by simuloid

The text-to-choices ratio is not high, but your choices seem to make a difference. As a player, I was immersed in the game and felt good when my character was able to achieve a good result in the game world.

There were a couple of typos in the text, but I couldn't contact the author directly because I would have needed an itch.io account.

Play time for me was about 20 minutes, making this game on the short side, but I think it's a good length for this format.

I played the browser-based version, which had a few formatting problems (text overlapping other text on some screens). The layout of the game is good, and the feedback from making an incorrect move is pretty good to guide you in making correct moves.

I did not win the game, nor did I get to a screen that told me I lost, so I just sort of made selections until I got tired of it (that took me maybe 5 minutes -- I have no patience for such things)

A lot of care went into getting data into this game, there are a lot of choices, and I think the author's intention is to raise awareness of how hard it is to afford a balanced breakfast. If that's the case, then they kind of succeeded. Once I went to the checkout, I found it hard to easily substitute items. Also, the authors and I disagree on what "balanced" means. If there were indicators in the game that showed money remaining and what nutrients were missing to guide shopping choices, this would be a 4-star game. If the formatting issues were then fixed, it would be 5 stars because there would then be nothing to complain about.

(Spoiler - click to show)I think that Cheerios, 2% milk, and Vegetable Juice make a balanced breakfast, but the game insisted that I buy some kind of bread and some kind of spread as well. I reject that premise!

Text is error-free. Choices matter. Play time is short enough that I can recommend it to everybody, because even if you hate it, you haven't lost much. The setting is not my cup of tea, and I still played it through a few times to check out alternatives.

The gameplay is simple. You read a number of profiles of monsters each day, and pick the one that is least repugnant until you have a chance to meet the monster of your dreams.
The randomly generated monster profiles are cute, but you'll start to see repeats pretty quickly.
I'm not sure if the choices you make matter at all, so again not so much a game as a toy.

Nice descriptive prose, with just enough player input to keep me clicking through the text. There's one choice at the beginning that probably decides how successful some decisions are later on.

Over all, I found it like reading an over-long poem. It didn't scratch either my game playing nor my story reading itch.

Still, the author did a good job with the text and evoking emotions. It's just not my bag, baby.

I love everything about this game. It's length is perfect for me; I am a deliberate player and was able to finish it in an hour while taking notes. The puzzles are challenging without being hard, and importantly all of them had clues in the game to help solve them. The material was all thematic, I found the game very immersive. I felt rewarded by the ending.
Despite being a One-Room Game, there is plenty to do with lots of Easter eggs, so there's even room to replay and try just fooling around.

The quality of this game was top-notch, as one expects from Emily Short. I was stuck in the first prompt long enough to lose the first time I tried playing the game. I am not new to interactive fiction, but I must admit I've never been good at guessing the verbs and nouns I'm supposed to use in novel situations. I used the built-in help, but it was too generic to help me at the first prompt.
After I restarted, I determined to take my time and really think about what I was supposed to do and got past the first puzzle. That experience was longer than the 15 minutes the game was supposed to take. The rest of the game was pretty easy for me.
So 5-star quality, minus 1 star for what for me were inadequate hints for how to act at the first prompt, minus 1 star for not being a bit longer, perhaps (Spoiler - click to show)adding another round or two of the pick the creature's home-world game.

I am a slow reader. Despite this, I was able to play through the game in about 20 minutes. "Play" is a generous term. The attractively rendered HTML pages contain a couple of hyperlinks each that serve to take you to the next room or an item description.

The writing is good, the descriptions evocative, the grammar correct (at least, I didn't spot any errors). But at no point was I frightened, nor did I feel that my actions had any bearing on the progress of the story. It felt like a pick-a-path adventure where all the choices lead to the same page.

In fairness, I didn't play through more than once, so it's possible that clicking links in a different order leads to a different ending.