Ratings and Reviews by P. B. Parjeter

This is a well-made Twine/Sugarcube game that tries to get as close to the traditional adventure game format as possible.

I’m going to skip right to the game’s main mechanic: the telekinesis spell.

Often in Twine and choice-based adventure games — and even in graphical adventure games — I feel like I’m just doing object association. It doesn’t feel like I’m doing something, because unlike in parser games, I can’t spontaneously try a verb.

Despite those limitations, using the telekinesis spell in The Dragon of Silverton Mine kind of does feel like performing an action. That’s because it has slightly different effects throughout the game: sometimes it just moves a thing where the game needs it to go; sometimes it shifts something to dislodge a buoyant object, and sometimes it doesn’t work and you’re informed that you need to power it up.

(Certain other Twine games also have central mechanics with diverse effects. I got the same feeling from Agnieszka Trzaska’s The Bones of Rosalinda. Bones has a more complex and more impressive central mechanic, but I also enjoyed the simplicity of Dragon.)

These systems still don’t give total freedom of action, but they do give a sensation that can’t just be reduced to handling or using an object.

Otherwise Pretty Traditional

Apart from that, the The Dragon of Silverton Mine is short and sweet.

Not all puzzles involve the telekinesis spell. Many puzzles fall back on object association, and the game gives you a lot of information when you need it. If you try and use two things and you did it wrong, the game pretty much tells you what you need to do.

I only felt misdirected in one puzzle — the one where you need to get oil. You need to find it in the (Spoiler - click to show)shed, but oil is also mentioned in a few places that you’ll probably have visited more recently.

I think I spotted a few minor bugs, too. The hidden burrow is described in the inventory screen before you actually uncover it. And I think the note about the ring reappeared in its original position after the game took both the ring and the note out of play. These are minor things, and I didn’t see any errors that broke the game. It’s very well-made, especially for what seems to be a first game — though maybe the author has made stuff outside of IF.

The humor is good, and the final twist is fun. However, I would note that the game gradually becomes funnier as you progress — I was expecting a much more serious game when I started.

Decent Design

Finally, I wanted to comment on the design. This game modifies the Sugarcube layout a bit.

I’ve come to kind of dislike Sugarcube’s default sidebar because it takes up a lot of space and is very empty by default. I assume that the reason it’s laid out like so that authors can easily add things line-by-line, like in @agat’s 4x4 Galaxy. However, most games don’t make full use of the sidebar, leaving me to collapse it.

Anyway, The Dragon of Silverton Mine opts to simply move the buttons to the footer, which I like. It would probably be better if they were fixed in place so you don’t need to scroll to see them, just like how the sidebar is fixed. However, The Dragon does something else that’s really important: it keeps each passage reasonably short, even when it appends object text to the end of the page. So I like the layout overall.

Moving onto another topic of design, the game also uses italics to distinguish object links (which append text) from room links (which go to a new passage). Verses also visually distinguished links in a similar way. I don’t know where this started or how widespread it is, but I guess it’s good if it’s becoming more common.

This is an early portion of a game about a detective who has been asked to rescue somebody from the drudgery of office work — though the job seems allow for a little bit of rebellious creativity.

There a few things that the author did well. The written voice is very direct, conversational, and concise, which is refreshing.

And, mechanically, this is Twine at its most straightforward. It has choices that lead to other passages, and those passages usually return to the mainline plot.

Possibly Dada

However, as others have noted, it’s a bit unclear exactly what’s going on. Some people have called it surreal.

I visited the main author’s website and found he’s done some other work in dadaism, which seems to be distinct from much of surrealism.

Here’s an explanation I found by Googling:

As Dada’s artistic heir, Surrealism presented a contrasting idea: instead of wishing to overturn society, the Surrealists sought to re-enchant life by probing the inner-workings of reality by exploring irreality.

That’s just one explanation, but building on it: I’d say that this game isn’t surreal in the same way as Verses is, which seems like a more common type of surrealism.

Verses has tightly interconnected themes and images that don’t necessarily point to anything in real life (especially the core analysis process), but which do point to things in the reader’s internal being.

By contrast, The Lost Artist has a lot of core parts that are pretty grounded individually and draw on real things (like bank heists, private investigations, and corporate jobs) rather than abstract ideas — they just don’t connect in a normal way, and they rely heavily on non-sequitir.

The Lost Artist also has the anti-institutionalist themes that apparently define dadaism. The fact that the characters are trying to apply originality on top of corporate work makes me think of possibly the most well-known example of dadaism: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, which turned a signed urinal as an art installation. The Lost Artist’s repurposing of corporate/industrial stuff is less crude, but the idea is similar.

Sometimes Confusing
If dadaism is the author’s intended goal, it’s natural that the game feels disjointed. However, I’m still going to highlight a few jarring things, because I don’t know whether they’re intended or not.

First, the prologue has its own prologue. The story begins in media res with a bank heist, then transitions to an office scene. It seems like the characters become indentured servants as a result of the heist — but maybe not, since it’s a fuzzy transition.

Secondly, the story tells you what’s artistic and what’s drone work in a way that’s hard for the reader to infer for themselves. As Mike Russo noted in his review, the bit about saving money on logos is confusing. The work that the characters are doing isn’t clear on the whole, and the game is currently very short, meaning that there aren’t really enough examples to make this all gel. (The game is unfinished, so my impression could change as more content as added.)

Third, there’s a co-author, Martina Oyhenard. I have no idea what she contributed. Perhaps she refined the main author’s ideas, or perhaps the idea was to combine two authors’ disjointed contributions exquisite corpse-style. Or maybe the goal was something in between.

It’s impossible to say. It would be interesting to hear the authors comment on the writing process. Maybe they will in a post-mortem, but this strikes me as the kind of game where a magician never reveals their secrets … so who knows?

I felt kind of detached from this game, but it’s decent.

It’s a bit of a Rorscach test. Throughout the game, you’re given a range of choices which seem to range from most active to least active.

The situation is clearly pretty bad early on. But acting passively and risking neglect is conceivably as good a response as a heavy-handed solution that makes things worse, so all of the options are viable at face value.

This made reading other people’s reviews pretty interesting. The apparent differences in reviewers’ preferred choices intrigued me and convinced me to play.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the choices are that interesting on their own right. First of all, the ruler in the game is portrayed as excessive, but was hard to feel that anything he did was particularly shocking. I thought the weird stuff might be par for the course, since the game seems to have a historical setting (or possibly a fantasy-historical setting).

Secondly, I got the feeling that the author was trying to draw a parallel to the modern day in some way that isn’t clear. I suppose the central famine could be highlighting concerns about an ecological disaster or a global food crisis. However, it could be a stand in for any kind of fatalism (or, derogatorily, “doomerism”). But in the end, the specific events in the game don’t seem to add up to any sort of parable.

Since the game presents extremely broad life philosophies at the end, maybe I am totally off base in trying to find social commentary. My apologies to the author in that case.

A Good Foundation

Even though I was presented with choices that didn’t intrigue me. the game did gently nudge my pessimistic tendencies, and the basic scenario was good enough to hold my attention for the 15-20 minute playtime.

I think it might difficult to make a thoroughly compelling story around this structure because the audience is waiting for a collapse that acts as a payoff, which kind of devalues the incidental events that lead up to the ending.

A counterpoint might be The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, which relies heavily on side characters and plots to tell its story of impending doom and is highly regarded. However, I haven’t played it for decades and never played it in full, so I don’t know how closely you can really compare it.

A Squiffy Game in the Wild

Finally, this is the first time I’ve come across a game made in Squiffy, or at least, the first time that I’ve consciously noticed one, which is surprising since the engine is apparently about ten years old.

I only see a few games tagged or keyworded with ‘Squiffy’ on IFDB. Can anyone tell me how common this engine is?

I played Chandler Groover’s “The Bat.” I really enjoyed it. Its frustratingly relaxing, kind of like Sim City and Roller Coaster Tycoon.

The game keeps piling things onto you and there’s an ominous money score in the corner. I don’t know exactly how this works. I think the game could have deducted money more aggressively, but I’m happy with it regardless.

The situation is this: you’re a valet for a Bryce Wyatt, who is (not much of a spoiler) a (Spoiler - click to show)Batman/Bruce Wayne analogue. He seems to be a sort of were-bat.

The game doesn’t use the term were-bat, but I wanted a word that distinguished his situation from vampirism. Unlike vampires, which are famous for flying, sucking blood, and their brooding elegance, Master Wyatt appears to have adopted the more mundane aspects of bats, such as screeching, climbing, preening, hitting walls, and, most importantly, dropping guano on people.

The plot develops as (major spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)a Selina Kyle/Catwoman analogue starts stealing things from the other guests. You, as Master Wyatt's valet, have to deal with this and everything else that goes wrong.

The writing is very funny, and it’s one of the funniest IF games I’ve played in recent memory. The situations are absurd, the wealthy patrons’ ignorance of the situation is hilarious, and there are some great one-liners. For example:

There’s no good reason to remove this magneto-polonium from the vault right now, but there are many bad reasons.

The baron, of course, is both an oil baron and a real baron.

You wring the soggy newspaper into the pond. Now it’s as good as new (which speaks volumes about its original state).

There is some mild implied adult content. It’s not explicit and doesn’t really merit a content warning (which I don’t think the game has). And, on principle, I wouldn’t request a content warning on any work. But, as a matter of reviewing the game, The Bat requires you to make some inferences that might be uncomfortable if you’re playing this with friends, family, or other company.

The Gameplay

In The Bat, gameplay is simplified so that you only need to “attend to” certain items in the presence of someone or something.

This means that the complexity of the game generally comes from the fact that you can only hold one or two objects at a time. In other words, you need to keep track of where you leave everything across the game’s roughly 13-room map.

On top of that, there are a lot of things to do in “The Bat” at any given time. Many of these tasks are repetitive (especially serving drinks), but since you don’t have to do them in any specific order, it doesn’t actually feel repetitive, and it encourages you to keep moving.

Technically, this does pad the game out more than necessary, but I don’t really have any complaints. The only thing seemed excessive was the need to close certain things, like the icebox or vault, before leaving a room. This is pretty rare, but it could have broken the flow if there were a larger number of containers throughout the game.

The bottom line is that the tasks are simple. There are a few times where you do need to solve light puzzles, but these are straightforward, well-clued, and mostly limited to Act II. I only checked the walkthrough — which is styled in an interesting way — once and I would have solved the problem if I was more patient.

The Characters

There’s a large cast of characters. The valet and player character, aka Albert, is characterized as dryly satisfied with and accustomed to the idiosyncracies of his job.

Since the characters are analogues, Albert is presumably meant to be (Spoiler - click to show)Alfred Pennyworth. However, that character isn’t really iconic on their own; rather, I imagine this is what P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves is supposed to be like.

The titular Bat, aka Master Wyatt, doesn’t really have much characterization. Throughout most of the game, he can’t speak and only causes chaos. There’s a bit of a development when you start putting his disruptive talents to use (particularly when you have him (Spoiler - click to show)deal with the Baron’s moustache), which seems to give Master Wyatt a bit of agency. But at the end of the game, he’s just a normal billionaire playboy with no recollection of events.

I think one thing that makes Master Wyatt in bat form likeable is that the rich patrons’ superficially gentle and civil demands are far more irritating than the trouble caused by Master Wyatt himself.

And despite being oblivious to the Master Wyatt’s general condition, the rich patrons have a bit of savviness among themselves. (One remarks that there’s nothing interesting up there as Master Wyatt stares at the ceiling; another quips: “You’ve always had trouble appreciating things from another person’s perspective”.)

Otherwise, I kind of lost track of the guests’ unique identities, apart from (Spoiler - click to show)Célina, who gradually emerges as a key character.

Finally: this is a really approachable game. I finished this game almost entirely without using a walkthrough. I played it in two sittings across three days — the middle day involved dealing with a surprise tax notice in real life, which seems appropriate — and I managed to pick up the game again easily and complete it. A really good game overall.

This is a Twine game where it’s easier to grasp the themes than the plot.

It’s broadly about the human mind, language and comprehension, and the utility and horrors of those things.

The game mainly conveys its theme through mechanics: specifically, it uses text-replacement links that reveal translations and interpretations.

You, the player character, interact with the text mainly in dark-colored passages. You’re analyzing possibly alien objects that have degenerative effects on the mind and body. The task involves analysis and language translation at times.

I think it gets a little excessive in the light-colored passages. This portion of the game contains a lot of technobabble and obscure words. I wasn’t sure how much of this I was supposed to gloss over, but I think the excess is partially a joke because a few of the responses were kind of evasive and ironic.

(That said, there is some real player engagement here, as these light colored passages are where you actually navigate the world through conveniently marked red links. There are also some more involved poetry translations in the light section, too.)

I’m not going to go deep into anything else Verses features, such as the horror and gore or the poems it adapts, but those things are certainly in the game.

What Does It Mean?

What does it all mean? It’s hard to say but I’ll hazard a guess. Mathbrush’s review noted the game has “violent semi-religious imagery no explicit moral or meaning.” However, in this sort of work, there’s usually a standard implicit meaning, usually with a moral slant — the idea that knowing too much is painful, usually as a result of suffering or committing evil, which I guess is next door to scientific hubris.

I think it’s safe to say all of this applies to Verses. There’s a monk character that discusses whether the protagonist will continue looking for answers through a religious/philosophical/spiritual lens.

Verses additionally frames the effects of your analysis work in a scientific way, and there’s some agonizing over knowing the impact of your work.

That’s the broadest explanation I can give. Saying this game is open to interpretation is a bit of a cop out, since a lot of the musings seem deliberate and sincere.

I think that the author is depending on the fact that the audience can feel anything at all means it has some correspondence with reality. I found a few striking. And if you don’t relate to the game’s musings on a personal level, you’ll probably be impacted by its strong atmosphere regardless.

Lots of Comparisons

Within IF, Verses should draw comparisons to Babel and Slouching Toward Bedlam, which tackle similar concerns about knowledge, language, and cognition and have religious/scientific/philosophical overtones.

There might be an even better point of comparison outside of IF: the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker, and the novel it was partially based on, Roadside Picnic. In addition to the Eastern European setting, the film and novel concern the search for things or places that carry a similar danger of knowledge.

I don’t mean to undermine Verses’ originality or elevate its quality by making that comparison, but those two works are very similar in some ways.

Finally: is it good? I only rate about half of the games I review, and Verses is especially difficult to assign a rating to because I didn’t really grasp it in full. Other people have rated it highly. I think I still prefer Computerfriend, which is relatively approachable in my opinion.

“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.