Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This game has truly great multimedia. I had some troubles with it (mentioned later), but I've never seen a Twine game at this level when it comes to video usage.

This spy game has constantly changing background animations that preserve a high degree of readability. There's a great score, and the videos/animations are just so crisp and readable.

The puzzles are honestly very clever, but again a technical mishap got me.

These were the things that I had trouble with:
-When I first opened the game, I had no sound.
-I restarted the game, but that popped up several javascript/Twine errors
-Then I restarted again, and the audio worked, but then....
-The AR thing seems to require a very specific set of technology that I could only solve with weird finagling. I had to (description of partial solution of this puzzle) (Spoiler - click to show)scan a QR code, so, since I was playing on the computer, I used my phone. But that took me to a twine game with a constantly moving link to click. That just straight-up doesn't work in Twine on mobile safari. So I copied the url into my email and sent it to my computer. Once you solve that Twine, you get sent to an AR. But the AR requires motion tracking, so I again had to email the url to myself so my phone could do the AR. This could all be solved by removing the text movement portion of the twine minigame you get sent to when you scan the QR code and replacing it with a different cool thing.

The storyline broke the 4th wall a lot but was honestly genuinely funny. There are some great lines here, and the audiovisuals and writing put together are very impressive. The tech troubles I had are the only thing keeping me from 5 stars.

Features strong profanity, some gruesome violence.

I rarely review a game without playing it to completion. To explain my omission in this case, I'd like to describe my play experience.

This was the second python game I played in this competition, so I had a better idea of how to get it running than I did on that one.

There are two ways to compile it: command prompt or web version.

I first tried command prompt and found it very slow, so then I tried the web version.

The web version has a several seconds pause between each line of text. This is somewhat frustrating, but not too bad. But the web version also blanks the screen frequently, and on a timer, so important text gets overriden by incidental 'flavor' text, making the text sometimes too slow and sometimes too fast.

The slow text, while a drawback, would have been manageable if not for the fact that:
-the same text pause happens when you make an error
-the game doesn't recognize most standard parser commands

For instance, you can't LOOK AT, W means WAIT instead of WEST and N means NEXT instead of NORTH. TALK TO is also not recognized. There is a HELP command, which lists helpful things to do, but in the web version sometimes typing HELP just gave me the environmental text, and HINT never worked.

So, much of my gameplay consisted of trying commands, getting errors, trying other commands, getting errors, all at a fairly slow pace.

The main game concept seems like it could work, but I can't proceed right now.

This game does a lot of good things, and really drew me in.

You play as a nouveau-riche socialite who is also a catburglar/art thief.

Gameplay revolves around two mechanics: conversation and puzzles.

The conversation consists of choosing one of three attitudes: Friendly, Direct, and Leading On (?) (I can't quite remember what they stood for). Most conversations last 2-4 choices and you have to use the feedback you get from the NPC to determine if you are making the right choices or not, so there is some allowance for mistakes.

The puzzles consist of both strategizing (often the choice is between being fast and risky or quiet and slow) and text-entry. I liked the last puzzle quite a bit.

I found the Gwen character a little annoying, but enjoyed the MC a lot. If you're a fan of Alias the Magpie, I think you'll enjoy this too.

Note: The many save files available were great. I decided not to try and get a perfect game, but I did use one save once to recall what someone had said many turns earlier.

This is a Spring Thing game written in Ink. In it, you play a young man in a mining town where a disaster has struck. There are several chapters, each of which has 3-4 binary choices to choose from, with several paragraphs of text per choice.

I'm going to rank this on my five-point scale:

+Polish: I could have sworn I saw some typos but not sure. Game looks nice, generally polished.
+Descriptiveness: I quite liked the descriptiveness in this game, the characters were interesting and the mine scenes were excellent.
-Interactivity: This is a hard one. It's better than many games I've seen, but in general it's very hard to figure out what kind of effect different choices might have. It branches wildly, but seems generally forgiving. In a perfect world, I would have hoped for choices that have some kind of pattern, so I could make a plan, but unexpected surprises, so I'd have to adjust that plan.
+Emotional impact: I really got into my character and my feelings for the town.
-Would I play again: Even though it branches a lot, I didn't feel a strong desire to replay. Glad I played once, though.

Like many of the Back Garden Spring Thing games, this is a demo for a much longer game in the future.

As in Bez's other games, the writing here is well-done, and the characters are well-defined with distinct personalities (for me, at least). The audiovisuals were excellent, although I didn't see any easy way to mute the music (for, for instance, taking a phone call while playing).

The idea is that you work at a store in the background of Cyberpunk 2077 (a game I have never played, so I may be missing some nuance here). You have a boss that literally monitors your thoughts and docks your pay when you step out of line.

I feel like the game suffers in how its message translates into interaction. The game has a good message which is completely reasonable (the use of surveillance tools by employers and other features of a police state are bad). But sometimes it feels like the game looks like it offers a choice but not really; your character is asked about your feelings but you are also told your feelings. I feel like it might be better to have one or the other: have no choices about how you feel but a lot about your actions (the way Howling Dogs or their angelical understanding does), or allow choices about how you feel and let the player stick with it, even if the consequences are dreadful (like Lore Distance Relationship). As one older author wrote, you can't act unless you're enticed by two contrasting things, the sweet and the bitter.

I don't think I would have played this game if I hadn't been committed to reviewing all the Spring Thing games. Downloading Python 3 was tedious and frustrating, having to type exact commands was rough, and restaurant sim's not my favorite genre.

Still, I was engaged by this game and played through till the end. You run a diner on the moon (or Mars, although I didn't try that diner), ordering food, finding what customers want, making recipes, serving it up, then taking care of the diner or hanging out with a friend.

I enjoyed the little narrative snippets when hanging out with my friend the good Doctor. She gave me lots of cool trinkets and talked about space.

Auto-complete was a lifesaver, although I have to ask, why go to the trouble of using autocomplete but then have so many customers whose names start with O? It'd be way better to have every customer name have a distinct letter, or at least spread them out roughly uniformly (unless, by a cosmic joke, they were uniform and I just got 'O' tourists over and over again).

This game was okay, but I felt like I was fighting the system all the way. The question is, what's next? If the authors were trying to learn python better or demonstrate their use of python, then that's great, this is a cool program. If their goal is to create awesome IF, I would ditch python and go with a specialized language like Twine or Ink.

This game describes itself well on the Spring Thing page, where it says:

"I’ve entered it in the Back Garden section because it is
not very large, it has had insufficient testing and consequently has some rough spots. It should anyway be playable through and hopefully provides some enjoyment along the way. A walkthrough is available in a separate file. Have fun!"

I found the puzzles pleasant and the overall atmosphere light and breezy, but there were several typos or bugs.

Overall, you're trying out for a spy type job and have to infiltrate a house. Puzzles are presented one at a time, generally, with each solved puzzle giving a clue to the next one.

The hints could definitely have used some fine-tuning, but the author seems well aware of that. I had fun, but could have had more.

This game is short but has a lot of different branches. It's not really a time cave, since some branches come together, so it's interesting.

There's a girl at your school who is icy-cold and intimidates teachers to keep them from saying her name. Therefore, no one knows it, so you take a bet to find out.

There are a lot of paths, most resembling cute high school movie tropes.

I liked the game; the writing was cute, the characters charming. The backstory seems a bit sad but relatable. I always felt that writing a game is like sharing a bit of your soul with others, and reading/playing that game is a way of honoring and accepting that.

I guess my main drawback for the game is that it mostly amounts to guessing what each action will do, and I wish there was a way to puzzle it out more; but that's just me and not everyone may feel that way.

This is the kind of game that comes along only once every few years, especially recently: a polished parser game that lasts far longer than 2 hours.

The author is inspired by Anchorhead, Blue Lacuna, and City of Secrets. Of those 3, I find this game to be closest to City of Secrets in both play style and prose style.

You are a medical student trying to solve a mystery: a mysterious black plague is destroying people in your city, and you have to help them.

To solve this, you need to go through 4 acts (plus a beginning and interlude) to reach the depths of the mystery.

The map for this game is quite large, and it comes with an in-game graphical map that looks great.

Like Anchorhead and Blue Lacuna, gameplay is divided into days. Unlike those games, gameplay is narrowly funneled. This game reads more like a movie than a novel, with an emphasis on scripted conversations and scripted action scenes. Only rarely are there simultaneous puzzles, and the most difficult puzzle is generally learning to navigate the impressively large and responsive city environment, which has both randomized events and time-based changes.

This is a love story, too, with multiple love interests and multiple endings. Romance plays a key role in numerous scenes. It uses other movie-like techniques, including a lot of foreshadowing and an emphasis on visual and aural descriptions (okay, that's not just in movies, but it just feels like a movie).

There have been two really negative reviews of Anchorhead in recent years, criticizing that game for not being 'funneled' enough, for having too open of a world, too subtle of story, not enough romance, etc. This game directly addresses all of those issues, with its constrained gameplay and copious allowances (such as a GO TO feature, in-game map and journal with a list of goals). On the other hand, for fans of the open world, exploration, and difficult puzzles of Anchorhead, it may pose too slight of a challenge. Blue Lacuna was in a similar spot, and offered two versions: a story version and a puzzle version.

For me, though, I enjoyed playing through this game, and truly consider it a rare game. I think it will do well in the XYZZY awards for 2021, and makes me want to try my hand at something like this, although I expect it would take as many years as the author's original did.

The polish on this game is impeccable, the setting and prose is descriptive, I'd definitely play again, the interactivity is a bit narrow but has several fun puzzles (including [mild spoilers](Spoiler - click to show)a nice math one), and emotionally was satisfying. Recommended for fans of story-focused parser games. I spent around 5 hours on this game.

Review for 2017 Spring Thing preview:
This game is advertised as being incomplete, but a very large chunk of it is done. Playing it is like playing 'episode 1' of a large series.

The setting is unusual: you are in a large and decaying city where magic and science are blended together. Scalpels and anesthesia blend with goblins and soul magic.

I found the opening to be a bit constraining (which is something I do in my own games, too), but that after that the game was rich and rewarding. Locations have several interactible details, conversations feel natural, and I felt like a real detective.

I enjoyed the large feeling of the city, something difficult to do right in an interactive fiction game. I did get a bit lost from time to time. Locations were unique and vividly described.

I would love to see this finished.

While this game is unfinished, I found it a pleasant surprise. In format it reminds me of Lifeline, a once-popular game where you were texting with an astronaut and guiding them around a planet.

In this game, you have a nosy mother who is very interested in the death by fire of her neighbor. You give her advice as she learns more about the death and investigates.

I found the characters well-depicted and funny. The writing needs polishing, but it might be fine as-is since it represents the way the characters talk in real life.

The text timing and animation could use a little tweaking. Something about it seems a little off, making it hard to read.

Overall, I'm looking forward to the finished version! If possible, I'd love the final version to have controls for text speed, audio, and saving.