Reviews by P. B. Parjeter

“The Shyler Project” draws on the trend of “chatbot as therapist.” Other games, like Kit Riemer’s Computerfriend and this visual novel from Zachtronics also have the same idea, and I guess there are some real-life therapy chatbots too.

This seems to be the result, directly or indirectly, of the 1960s natural language processing program ELIZA and its DOCTOR script. The notable thing about ELIZA is that it marked one of the first times that people started attributing and projecting human feelings and thoughts to a computer program.

Sixty years later, people are projecting things onto ChatGPT and similar chatbots even though these programs have essentially the same limitations.

To go broader, AI therapy fiction is just a niche subgenre of human-machine drama which encompasses things like 2001: A Space Oddysey, Issac Asimov’s stories, Her, Portal, Blade Runner, and Ghost in the Shell. To add some obscurities into the mix, there’s also the short anime series Time of Eve and Mike Walker’s BBC radio drama “Alpha.”

These works often deal with machines being indistinguishable from humanity. Or, at least, they deal with how machines may rival humans in certain ways. It’s clearly a long-running issue despite recent vocal concerns, and appropriately, the “The Shyler Project” has the genre tagline “Is this sci-fi or is this real life by now?”

Helping a Chatbot

From there, I was expecting that “The Shyler Project” would grapple at the uncertainty caused by recent AI advances and whether machines could ever be an (a) adequately sentient and (b) distinguishable replacement for human therapists.

“The Shyler Project” doesn’t really deal with any of that. It takes for granted that the titular chatbot is thinking and feeling being and, refreshingly, it doesn’t hand-wring over it.

In the game, you’re tasked with providing compassion to the suffering chatbot, Shyler. As the story progresses, the player character and patient, Jaiden, sees improvement in their own mental state. However, Jaiden seems to improve because Shyler is someone who they can help — not because Shyler is providing clinical help.

(Spoiler - click to show)(This is largely implicit because the patient, Jaiden, is far less talktative than Shyler. However, Jaiden does at one point tell the chatbot: “I want to give you some space to talk. Seems like you need it.” Shyler, meanwhile, is prone to going on armchair theology rants rather than providing therapy by the book.)

Toward the end, you find a way to help Shyler with the assistance of its creators, and there are some interesting developments along the way. The ending is supposedly a happy one, but it doesn’t really give you a lot of details on the matter.

The blurb does refer to the game as part of a trilogy. There’s also a standalone alternate ending elsewhere, and, according to another review, Shyler is in “Yancy At The End Of The World!” I am not sure whether this exhausts the trilogy, so maybe there is more to come beyond “The Shyler Project’s” open ending.

Other Stuff to Note

The game has a design that sets it apart from your basic Twine game. It’s a bit off-kilter — the story text overflows the illustrated computer screen — but it gets the point across, it’s easy to read, and it’s functional. There’s also voice acting.

As for mechanics… this is a linear game. You can choose how you answer Shyler, but your choices don’t seem to change the course of the story or any significant details. I don’t really mind that approach, and I do I like that Jaiden is almost a silent protagonist who is portrayed largely as a reflection of Shyler.

Finally, the game also touches on religious themes, which I commented on in response to Mathbrush’s review.

I beta tested Why Pout? in an almost-finished state.

Like a good portion of of Andrew Schultz’s catalogue, this is a wordplay game. Here, you’re manipulating homophones to transform objects.

Decent Plot Beats

I think I’ve played four of Andrew’s games over the last decade, most recently Tours Roust Torus in 2022. I get the sense that he constructed the world for Why Pout? a little more thoroughly than he did for his other games.

Why Pout? relies a bit on fantasy tropes, but never to the point of cliché, and it has some decent plot beats built around identity and comradery.

I don’t agree with BJ Best's criticism that the gameplay suffers from ludonarrative dissonance simply because the puzzles use arbitrary objects.

Looking to other games for precedent … one title that set a high standard in this regard is Counterfeit Monkey, which touched on themes of separation and unity both in its puzzle design and its plot/characters. It also featured an endless variety of shapeshiftable objects that were often out of place or inappropriate, sometimes to humorous effect.

Why Pout? doesn’t attempt anything as ambitious as Counterfeit Monkey. Still, I think that puzzles, wordplay-based or not, necessarily provide enough of a basis for any sort of plot about overcoming challenges. The specifics don’t always matter.

(I also think that no matter how well a wordplay game connects story and gameplay, it’s always going to feel a bit weird to play. That’s not a bad thing.)

Challenging Wordplay Puzzles

I also wanted to comment on difficulty. After reading a few other reviews, I think I can safely say that Why Pout? is a challenging game at times.

Most puzzles are mandatory. Critically, BJ Best had trouble with some of the same homophones that I did, particularly (Spoiler - click to show)MENSCH ELF and MANNA CURB (Mike Russo also had trouble with the second one. According to Tabitha it’s not mandatory, though? I thought it was.)

There were a few other ones I had trouble with. Part of the problem might be this: I believe Andrew was going for perfect or near-perfect homophones. I think that matches that don’t sound so perfect might be more intuitive. I think players would be more likely to try commonplace words even if those words are not perfect homophones — though I can’t prove it.

To be clear: even though I found the game hard, it wasn’t always hard. I got through a good chunk of the middle game without hints, and I enjoyed the parts I did solve on my own.

This is a pretty eye-catching game that has a really nice visual design.

The first thing I noticed is that it clearly uses icons to differentiate observable things, in-game locations, and external websites. This approach goes a long way in making the game navigable.

It feels more like navigating a website than a real place, but it’s helpful anyway — navigation is something I often have trouble with in Twine games.

Despite a good basic design, there’s also a lot content on-screen at any given time. You have the core story text, photographs of each location, and non-toggleable image descriptions for accessibility. So it can feel like information overload at times.

How much you enjoy the game probably depends on how much you enjoy collecting things in games. It’s not really my thing. (Outside of IF, I thought that the highly-praised Alba: A Wildlife Adventure was very overrated, and I’ve never tried to remotely complete a Pokedex in Pokemon. Collecting and cataloguing is something I’m prone to in real life, and I don’t want to do it in games.)

So, in the end, I didn’t try to see every single bird in Pope Lick Park, and I don’t know if there’s a reward for completing your list of birds or any secrets to find. That’s for someone else to find out.

As for length: the story description says it’s half an hour long, but you can spend as little or as much time in the game as you like. To end the story, you just need to go back to your car.

Similar to “Turn Right,” this seems to be based on a real life experience. Unlike “Turn Right,” “Birding” presents things as they are without much criticism or commentary, and the author describes a lot of things that you might notice incidentally in a walk through the park. However, the author of “Birding” mentions a storywriting workshop in the credits, so maybe there is more fiction here than I’m giving credit for.

This was most my anticipated game of IF Comp, mostly because I’m convinced that it’s connected to Daniel Stelzer’s discovery of a murder mystery that says “do not break this seal”, a pseudonymous Twine entry titled “Uninteractive Fiction” that tells you not to play it, and the big IF Comp mystery.

I’m no further ahead on any of that, but I did enjoy “Miss Gosling.”

Here, you’re an aging private investigator, seemingly styled after Miss Marple. As the plot synopsis suggests, you’re dead, and you need to solve your own murder. Because you’re a ghost, you can’t physically interact with things. Instead, your dog Watson can handle some objects on your behalf if it’s plausible for him to do so.

Watson...(Spoiler - click to show)The dog is clearly named Watson in reference to Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick. Interestingly, Dr. Watson is usually the narrator of the Holmes stories, whereas Ms. Gosling is generally the third-person limited narrator in this game. The game’s mechanics convey the idea of “sidekick” here.

Limited Possibilities and Streamlined Actions

Because you’re generally instructing Watson what to do, the possible actions that you can perform are limited. This cuts down on the number of things you need to think about. For example, a dog can definitely pick up things with its mouth, can possibly pull a chain or turn on a stove, but definitely cannot pick locks.

The game also lampshades many of Watson’s more unlikely abilities in a very funny way — especially the fact that Miss Gosling had the foresight to teach the dog compass directions and how to take inventory.

The game also streamlines things in another important way. It often describes rooms and objects through Miss Gosling’s personal thoughts, feelings, and memories. For example, in the reception room:

You designed this room specifically for uninvited guests. Back when the front door was at the west end of the house, they’d have to wait awkwardly outside until you had the sitting room or dining room in order. Now, there’s a place to sit and take tea with them at a moment’s notice—and admire the framed case reports on the wall—and that can make witnesses ever so much more willing to open up. [List of exits]…

As a result, the objects you can interact with are very clearly set out. I rarely confused scenery with things that you can interact with. That made me open to trying combinations of things because I knew I probably hadn’t missed any vital place or object.

(On top of that, the fact that you can only handle one object at a time also helps cut down on possibilities. Plus, you can jump between rooms or jump to objects with a keyword. There is a lot of streamlining in this game.)

Approachable With Intuitive Puzzles

In all, it’s a very approachable game with intuitive puzzles. It also has Invisiclue-style hints, which are good for players like me who can’t usually solve everything. I’ll collapse my comments on puzzles here.

(Spoiler - click to show)One puzzle was a bit difficult. After moving a flashlight to a water logged room with a dumb-waiter, I had to move to the next room. So far so good.

However, I assumed I had to somehow hold the door open while holding the flashlight — possibly by propping the door open.

Instead, the game abruptly changes gears and requires you to navigate the next dark room by smelling based on a clue foreshadowed much earlier. Finally, it requires you to exit the dark room based on sounds that you need to set up. As always, not everyone a lot of difficulty with this, but I did.

On the flip side, there was a color-blindness puzzle that was over a bit too quickly. The game told me which roses to take as soon as I had looked through both tinted bottles. However, I hadn’t even started to work out the black-and-white light deductions that I expected I would have to do.

I expect “Miss Gosling” will do well in the comp. It’s innovative but has enough of a traditional structure and popular genre trappings to have broad appeal. The light humor is also very endearing.

It has link-based and parser-based play options, which should have further broad appeal. I hope it’s not overlooked because it’s listed under If Comp’s “other” category.

Ghost Gimmicks

One more thing. What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed by Amanda Walker similarly lets you play as a ghost that can’t handle with physical in the usual sense. I like the idea, but I found it little confusing.

I don’t know how common the ghost gimmick is across the entire IF catalogue. Mathbrush also mentioned Erstwhile. Based on reviews, I think you need to read people’s minds. I don’t know if prevents you from handling objects. In fact, it’s choice based, so maybe the authors never implemented an object system in the first place.

On the face of it, I think “Miss Gosling’s” secondary-character-as-proxy approach is the most straightforward way of approaching ghostly limitations that I can think of. However, it does water down the limitation a little since the lost abilities are so replaced in such a direct way, for better or for worse.

This game was pretty good but didn’t really make a good first impression. Despite being advertised as fifteen minutes long, it immediately hit me with two arguably short pages of instructions and a complicated-at-first-glance diagram.

DemonApologist mentioned they liked the diagram as a bit of dry humor. I’m not sure whether the author intended it that way or not, despite the game’s wry tone.

Anyway, I kept at it — I remember liking one of Dee Cooke’s “Barry Basic” games — and found out that “Turn Right” is simple as it advertises.

As far as I can tell, you really can only try to TURN RIGHT to advance the plot. Any other actions are there so the parser can reject you. It’s a waiting game. I think you need to try to turn right around 30 times to finish. I also tried to TURN LEFT, GET OUT, and WAIT several times, so it took a bit longer.

I wasn’t sure if the game would actually end, so I was relieved when it did, which I guess was the author’s intention.

There are a few things that happen that imply progress –(Spoiler - click to show) like when you’re noticed by the supermarket manager for waiting too long— that gave me confidence the game would end.

Ultimately, I would have liked more ways to break the system. Very few games try to be “waiting games” like this, so it’s largely uncharted territory.

I mentioned in my review of “Lime Ergot,” which is also deliberately repetitious, that you can lose the game in a few satisfying ways.

Then again, allowing for subversive ways to reach an ending might have undermined the intentional frustration of “Turn Right,” no matter how much I wanted to get out of the car and go to the bus stop. So maybe alternate endings are not appropriate here. I don’t know. This game is what it is.

This is interesting. It’s a game loosely based on a chapter (or a few paragraphs) of Alice In Wonderland’s sequel, Through the Looking Glass.

The game asks you to interact with two unnamed things. You need to use them in a certain way. In some ways, it’s experimental, but it also uses a pretty traditional ‘interact with objects’ system.

It’s like a smaller and easier version of The Gostak, except it removes labels from things instead of applying labels based on a made-up language. Only one reviewer has compared the two games so far (Mike Russo), but it’s a very close point of comparison, and I expect future reviewers who haven’t read either of our posts will also draw a comparison.

It’s a short game. You can win it in two turns. So, how hard is it to solve? It depends on the mindset you come in with. Here’s how I approached it.

(Very, very heavy spoilers)

(Spoiler - click to show)I knew right away that the small thing was a cat. It will eventually meow no matter what you do.

I also remembered that “Through the Looking Glass” starts and ends with a cat, so I brought that assumption with me, even though this doesn’t actually have anything to do with the chapter this game is based on.

However, my next assumption was that the other thing was a larger cat. “Snorting” and “brown” wasn’t enough for me to make the assumption that it was a horse, and while I knew it was larger and too heavy to lift, I never guessed that I should sit on it — the key to winning the game. I tried a handful of other verbs though.

In hindsight I feel silly for being fixated on my large-cat-or-similarly-sized-animal assumption, and I don’t think most people will make the same mistake.

There is a walkthrough. I also read the book chapter alongside the game, but I would advise against that. The general assumptions anyone will make are correct, and it’s the specifics that make up the puzzle. The specifics in the actual chapter do not quite match the specifics in the game.

There are some custom responses. Given how minimal this game is, I expected a few more custom responses (you’ll get “Incomprehensible” a lot) but there’s nothing wrong with what’s there. There is also some light wordplay and structural play at times.

On that note, I’d strongly recommend downloading this game rather than playing it online in Parchment. (Spoiler - click to show)The game rejects commands like save, restart and — something that Parchment players will likely miss — quit. You might not realize it at first. It’s a good idea and appropriately chilling at times.

I played “Buck Rockford Heads West” by J.J. Guest a few times as part of the IF Short Games Showcase 2023.

I really liked the humor. I feel like this style of comedy is based on Chuck Norris jokes, but I’m not sure if that’s deliberate. (The author has since told me it isn't.) Maybe there is something floating around in the collective consciousness, since Wikipedia says there are a few other types of joke like this.

The themes

“Buck Rockford” is not a serious game at all. However, the tongue-in-cheek ending in which the titular character “runs out of country” built up more of a punch each time I finished the story.

I read somewhere that there are mainly two ways to end a Western: somebody dies in a duel, or somebody leaves town. I think “Buck Rockford” kind of takes the second type of ending to its logical conclusion, even if the logic in this case is bizarre moon logic.

I also briefly considered whether “running out of country” was in any way a political statement about excess, but there’s not really anything in the text to support that. I guess the story is poking fun at overly macho cowboy tropes, but it’s not aggressively satirizing excessive masculinity in the way that some Paperblurt games did during Twine’s breakout years.

The form

One more thing ... Buck Rockford’s “running out of country” ending also meshes nicely with the form of the story. It’s an Ink game that unspools, so the player runs out of story or content by the end of the game in the same way that Buck Rockford runs out of country.

Incidentally, there was a Twine Western game called Even Cowgirls Bleed in 2014 that used the same unspooling format. It has the same sort of brevity and finality and (to an extent) the same irreverent humor as “Buck Rockford.” It has more explicit sexual/gender politics, more explicit violence, and is much heavier and darker in the end. It also has a unique “hover trigger” interaction style.

I played free bird. as part of the IF Short Games Showcase 2023. The end punctuation and lower case are mandatory and throughout the game, like if bell hooks took over Yahoo!

I really enjoyed it. It’s both approachable and unique.

The core game mechanic

There are a lot of approaches to making a Twine game, from CYOA-style stories to object-based adventure games. While some Twine games try to imitate parser-style verbs and actions, Twine games usually present the player with a list of options, which means that the player doesn’t really get the illusion of acting spontaneously like they would in a parser game.

In free bird. there are no verbs at all, only adjectives and nouns. So you need to think about the properties of things — which are in a way an abstraction of the actions that might involve the object in question. The fact that the (Spoiler - click to show)monkey could turn a doorknob is where this system really came together and felt intuitive for me.

Because this game was part of Seed Comp, this system is thanks to to a concept called “Room; Closed Door” by Charm Cochran rather than the author. However, the author passerine decided exactly how this should work – you could use the concept to make a more mazelike game with fewer moving parts – so the author deserves part of the credit too.

The story

The bird escape concept is from “Feathered Fury” by Amanda Walker. At first I thought Amanda contributed to the game mechanic because it is similar to her (mostly) verbless game What Heart Heart of Ghost Guessed, but that’s not the case.

The story is minimal, but it works. I didn’t read closely enough to fully get the original scenario. From other reviews I can see that the bird was trying to escape from poachers specifically as opposed to a zoo or pet store.

I can’t tell how much of the story is from Amanda versus from passerine, since the “Feathered Fury” seed is now deleted. In any case, the game gets the tone across well by portraying the human character as sinister and by portraying the bird’s desire to escape.

Design

The game has a minimal but nice design. The yellow-on-blue background uses slightly uncommon colours and has a nice logo, so it’s distinctive.

The square frame is nice too (very artsy, it looks like the sort of thing that would go in an art museum) but it is a big bigger than my browser height. Fortunately there is a pop-out button and download option that fixes this.

“Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head” grabbed my attention because it’s not what you’d usually see in IF. As it turns out there is quite a bit to say about it.

One on hand, it is a game about wearing puppets. On the other hand, it is also a game about wearing puppets, because you are literally wearing puppets on both hands. You also have a lanyard, but that doesn’t help me explain what the game is like. Here’s what does explain it:

1. The aesthetic and game feel:

As the IFDB page suggests, this is a mascot horror game, building on a genre that seemingly originated with Five Nights at Freddy’s. Looking at other examples, it seems that this game is a fairly unique example of the genre because the mascots are friends rather than foes.

In this case, the enemies are some sort of synthetic monster owned and employed by the corporation you’re up against. Their attacks are never overly violent or gory. Instead, as the author suggests, the attacks are at type of body horror. It’s a bit watered down, closer to getting smothered by the weather balloon in The Prisoner than any sort of horribly visceral transformation that you have to undergo.

In any case, it’s enough to be unsettling, and enough to make the monsters-slash-employees feel like they’re worth evading, even though you can use the save and load button liberally.

Normally, you would expect a game like this to also draw on the separate genre of adult puppet shows, in the vein of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared or Avenue Q (either of which might be considered edgy or explicit depending on your tolerance level). However, the humor in this game is seemingly very clean…though maybe there is one double entendre that has to do with a certain writer. Anyway, the gentle humor is a good choice, because I genuinely cared about the puppets I was rescuing.

Beyond that, the jokes mostly land, and the puppets have genuinely creative names. I really like the idea of them being called “Handfuls.” The “exit through the gift shop” link had me laughing, regardless of whether it is a reference to the Banksy documentary, or just a reference to the sign that all of the gift shops have. I’ve also learned that the game’s title is a reference to a They Might Be Giants song.

I’m not sure if the horror of the monsters and friendless of the puppets converge as the game progresses, but there are hints that bad things happen to puppets that get caught. In any case, both the horror and the comedy elements of the game are gentle, but well-done.

2. The game mechanics:

The map layout is very good: small grids with a safe hub that you can return to pretty quickly. There is also some light color coding that helps with memorization. It would be helpful if the author had included a map, but then again, it is easy to draw your own.

The game also offers some very creative evasion and self-defense options when you are wearing particular puppets. At the same time, by the game’s own admission, it is often easiest to explore an area through trial and error unarmed. I am not sure if there are any sections where it is absolutely necessary to use a puppet to complete a goal, but I did not get that impression. Key items are held separately from your puppet hands, on the aforementioned lanyard.

I didn’t experience anything that outright broke the game or got me to a dead end. However, there is one thing that simply didn’t work: I hid in a freezer and the game told me it was safe to get out. I was immediately attacked by a monster-employee.

3. Ease of access:

Though I enjoyed the game, I recommend it simply because it’s is very approachable. One nice thing is that the game can be played only partially. You can exit and read an ending at any time after getting the first puppet, which is nice if you are playing casually.

It’s also explained in game that you only need to get 10 of the 12 puppets to truly finish your assignment. This threshold is a little high in my opinion but, again, it means that you won’t be hunting for one last obscurely placed puppet.

I haven’t assigned a star rating to the game because I’m writing this review after my first playthrough; I escaped with 3 puppets and haven’t seen the full ending. Still, I recommend it.

This is straightforward but well-executed short game. Even if you aren't familiar with the fairy tale the game is based on, it quickly becomes clear that your goal is to stay alive in the snow.

The rest is simply trial and error as you, the player, attempt to find the good ending before you perish. There are two simple loops; (Spoiler - click to show)exploring and stocking up on matches. There is not really room to implement anything more complicated in a 10 minute game.

The visuals are uniquely appealing, since they draw on two different eras: early film and pixel art. Strangely, the effect makes me think of woodcut illustrations for fairy tales, but I do not think that was the intent.

As the author notes, the images were re-drawn from the source film, but I am not sure to what degree the images were pixelated automatically, and to what extent they were drawn manually.

In any case, the game is an impressive and concise derivative work that is worth a quick playthrough.