Ratings and Reviews by Denk

If you found this game difficult it is understandable. Much of the technical information and questions don't make sense. The author (one of them?) clearly has misunderstood one or more basic concepts, especially watts, which the author seems to think is a unit of energy, which it isn't. It is a unit of power, which is energy per time unit. Joule is a unit of energy and 1 watt means 1 joule per second.

The best example in the game to illustrate this is probably:
"Excess Discharge Error: The amount of energy required by the load, 33600 watts, was more than the batteries and inverter could supply, at 4302.7 watts and 90% inverter efficiency."

Here, it becomes clear that the author (one of them?) thinks that watts are energy ("The amount of energy required by the load, 33600 watts, was..."). That wasn't a big deal if watts did not play a big role in the game, but it does. It is at the core of the game, that you shouldn't run out of energy. Most tech questions concerning energy are completely wrong. This is a problem, since many may walk away thinking they learned something. But they learned something wrong, which will confuse them if they later need to learn about watts, joules, power and energy.

One more example:(Spoiler - click to show)"How many watts are required to run the loads of a kettle that uses 26880W per hour for 3 minutes?
-134.4W 1344W -13440W 8064W"

Again, the author thinks that watt is a unit of energy. If the kettle had used 26880 joules per hour, it would make sense to say it used 26880 joules / 20 = 1344 joules after 3 minutes of operation. Best case, this was a trick question (but it isn't), because, if a kettle uses 26880W, it uses 26880W whether you run it for 3 minutes or 10 hours, simply because watts means joules per second. But according to the game, the "right" answer was 1344W.

Most questions seem to hold this misconception. However, I get the impression that more authors might have been working on this game, as parts of the game seem correct, e.g. when looking into the solar panel: "The batteries currently have 1734.9WH of energy" (though it would normally be written Wh, not WH). Here, the author applies an energy unit for energy as she should.

I hope the author will be able to learn from the mistakes and update the game. I think it has the potential to be a good game for people interested in technical stuff, if all the incorrect technical stuff is corrected and the difficulty level is appropriate. Until then I recommend NOT to play it.

I'm not sure if "origin stories" is correct to apply on this game, since not all of the included stories result in how things really are, but that is part of the fun.

The content warning "Contains bad poetry" tells me that this game doesn't take itself too seriously - it is here to entertain. The title seemed at first a bit silly, but perhaps it was intended. But looking back, the title would actually be fitting for a bedtime story for a child, as it could have revealed what the story was about unlike most titles. So somehow the title makes sense anyway.

I haven't read the book "Just So Stories for Little Children" by Rudyard Kipling, which inspired this game, so I don't know how much the game has in common with that book. Anyway, I am glad Peter Eastman made this game.

I was positively surprised. The writing is really good and humorous. You do have choices but not puzzles. It is more like branching stories. I know that the number of branches can explode if a story keeps branching so it was understandable that the number of choices was a bit limited.

There didn't appear to be bad endings, just different paths to different endings. Thus I did not see any reason to try again, as I was perfectly happy with the path I took. But for as long as it took, I was entertained. A short but fun game.

I don't mind short games if they have something original and if they are interesting or ingenious or hilarious etc. But I didn't think this game has much of that, though you might find a few funny responses if you specifically try NOT to solve the puzzles.

This game is an implementation of the classical "Fox, chicken and sack of grain" puzzle where you must cross a river, except that the animals and sack of grain have been replaced with something similar. Besides that, there is an extremely simple puzzle.

Nevertheless, I briefly felt slightly entertained as I couldn't quite remember the solution from my childhood, only parts of it. Luckily, the implementation is fine. After finishing the game, there is a short list of "amusing" things you can try, which was again fine but nothing special.

I think this might be a good game for someone new to parser games, as the player will get a feel of inventory limits, examining stuff, enterable containers etc.

For anyone else, they might be briefly entertained if they have never heard of the "Fox, chicken and sack of grain" puzzle.

I liked the beginning of this game a lot. The story is on rails with a puzzle here and there, which increases immersion. After 1-2 hours (depends on how fast you are), the game turns into a puzzlefest very similar to the Bullhockey games. I have played both Bullhockey games for a while, but they couldn't hold my interest, in the long run, so I never finished those.

I think I played for four hours and got 155 points out of 400 while I tried not to peek too much on the walkthrough. So the game is definitely huge. I do like a good long puzzlefest, but for some reason, this part of the game is not for me.

Perhaps because too many similar standard objects (chairs, tables etc in most rooms) must be searched and examined, too many locked doors must be attempted to be unlocked with each key (confusing, as the game, in the beginning, can figure out which key to use) and there are too many keys to keep track of. All this becomes rather tedious with only a few clever puzzles (maybe there are some deeper into the game). Perhaps just a combination of all these things.

I think the game would be more fun if the tedious puzzles were removed and only the good ones were kept. A lot of locations could also be removed, as they seem to be there mainly for realism, which isn't necessary.

Still, the beginning is truly excellent and I wanted to see the end, so I copied the very long walkthrough into the command line (had to cut it into 25 pieces) to see the ending, as I didn't feel like playing through the whole game to see the ending.

If BF Lindsay ever makes a game with the same gameplay style throughout as the beginning of this game, I would love to play it. Also, if he is able to improve his puzzlefests, I would like to play those too. Still, if you liked the Bullhockey games, you will probably like the entire game.

This is a very well implemented game, old-school in the sense that you need to examine and search a lot. But modern when it comes to the number of endings and how much you actually can ask the NPCs about.

In this game you get to talk to a lot of people and you can ask them about lots of stuff. You might get some proposals on what to ask about if you TALK TO the NPCs, though these proposals are not exhaustive. When I first finished the game, it was without hints, and I got 35 out of 50 possible points. The ending tells you a lot about the fate of the many NPCs, so you might want ot play again to get all the 50 points. I tried to replay it once. This time I understood much more, but didn't get any more points. Then I decided to stop.

For what it is trying to be, I think this game succeeds. If you don't mind examining and searching a lot in addition to "standard puzzles" I think you will like this one.