Reviews by MathBrush

I've been playing through old Spring Thing games, and several of them have been really large, which makes sense; Spring Thing was originally established in part to have a release venue for games too large for IFComp. Nowadays large games often get released in IFComp and the main draw of Spring Thing seems to be its non-ranked awards system and less intense competition.

This game is big. You're investigating a mage's tower, and just 1 or 2 levels alone would be a normal-sized IFComp game. I thought it was a 5-level tower, and felt that was long, but it's actually 9 levels, and they get harder as you go. And there are 3 class choices that change how you can act!

The gameplay resembles are more cheerful (but only slightly) version of Bronze, in that you are in a castle with servants bound by enchanted objects (in this case, crystal), all of whom you can free by breaking the crystals. Many of the captives are mystical nine-tailed cats forced into new bodies and with mouths fused shut.

Many of the puzzles are fair and interesting. As time goes on, though, I found several that I found a little unfair and others that were just too hard for me. There is a lot of work put into this game but with its expansive scope it just wasn't all 'filled in'. Conversation is a notable weak point, with exotic and wild creatures who just respond "I don't know much about that" when asked about themselves and things in their vicinity. There just wasn't enough polish to put in, which makes sense, as in a game this large it would have taken months and a small army of beta testers.

I played until I had rescued about 7 or 8 of 18 servants and found around 12 treasures, then used a walkthrough. I did the Mage path, and had fun with the spells. There is a lot of good content in this game, so I do recommend people play it, but to just remember that the odds are stacked against you finishing without a walkthrough due to missing synonyms for reasonable actions.

This game took me a week to get through, often using hints and cheats and occasionally a walkthrough.

This is a big game, and one of his earliest outside of mini-games like Fingertips. It's a sequel to Shuffling Around, his most popular game on IFDB and another anagram game.

This game follows the pattern of many of Andrew Schultz's games. It takes a wordplay theme (in this case, anagrams) and crams each room and object description with as many examples of that theme as possible (in this game, the opening rooms started out with fairly normal descriptions and only the later ones used a ton of anagrams). As in these other games, you navigate through various rooms encountering objects whose names fit into the theme, which you must then solve with wordplay. Typing the solved wordplay word changes the object in accordance with what you've typed. Many themes revolve around groups of people who are arrogant who must have their ego taken down a peg.

I think anagrams work well with this kind of gameplay, so I enjoyed the puzzles in this game more than usual. I do 'cheat' quite a bit, using online anagram solvers when stuck and so on. I used those the least when the areas had a 'theme' like conjunctions or adverbs.

Due to the proliferation in later text of anagrams for the sake of anagrams, some of the text became confusing. Here is an example piece of dialogue I had difficult understanding:

> "Opinions! That BS idea abides, biased!" Gunter glosses over Blue Frog Urbfogel, Bugler of Foulberg, and how he beat up monsters that came back anyway til he could beat her up? Talked to people who knew where hidden items like the horn-o-honor and gavel of Fogvale were. It was rigged! Now, with her dynamite, tidy name, oh, the soaring signora! Her vast harvest, her mystic chemistry-, her tact-chatter. Her lean elan's made Yorpwald go real galore--be aliver--a praised paradise--with her ReaLiv initiative for the Sunnier Unrisen Inner Us! From arsey years to so sane season! Had us voting her overnight the roving virgo then! Became a rowdy pal! Yorpwald was old, warpy, but now it's more wordy, pal! A Yapworld and Payworld! Oh, her good deeds!"

Because of that, I didn't try forming a mental model of the plot and instead just looked for obvious things to try making anagrams of, relying on the scanner first, then hints, then walkthrough if I got stuck.

Overall, I had a lot of fun. I did encounter a lot of bugs though. Both version 2 and 3 begin with a note from the author to himself to absolutely make sure to comment out beta testing commands and then lists them. At the very end of the game everything ends fast and it gives a yes/no questions, but answering YES ends up saying that there was a bug in the game or something didn't go right. There's a toaster that gives some buggy responses about xrays, as noted in the walkthrough (and which I experienced).

So, overall this game was great for me because I like trying to figure out anagrams, but I wouldn't recommend it in general except for other fans of anagrams, mostly due to the currently-existing bugs. I played it in my quest to play all Spring Thing games.

This game is mostly a chore simulator. You are in a village, and all the villagers ask you to run errands for them, like grabbing nails or wood. They take time to teach you how to do each task. While condensing it all into one day feels pretty overwhelming and would probably be a nightmare for a kid, it makes more sense if you envision it as just being a lifestyle where everyone works hard and this tutoring replaces school.

The game is in three acts, each more active than the previous. The first is chores in a familiar location. The second is unfamiliar chores, with a magical surprise. The third is in the middle of combat.

This feels Norse-related, with ocean-themed life and wolf mythology, but it could be a lot of places.

Some people mentioned that this game seems like it's telling the wrong moral. To me, it seems like this game is saying 'Fit into society, obey, don't stray from the path and have honor'. This is in distinct contrast to many children's tales which are about the wonders of imagination and of accepting things outside of your culture. Both though describe the perils of breaking one's word with magical creatures.

I did have trouble figuring out commands in a few points.

This game is a surreal game with no overarching explanation or moral.

You play as an office worker who lives in suburbia. You do various things like waking up, showering, going to work and so on.

As you play, you encounter disturbing changes to what you thought reality was. Early examples include work you've never seen before showing up on your desk or lunch turning into a ball of rotten meat.

I enjoy this kind of surreality in games a lot. The only drawback is that you have to try all sorts of things at times to figure out what the next move is that will advance the game. Sometimes this can be really tricky, which detracts from the experience. It's not so much hard puzzles as 'there are 20 things you can do right now but only one is correct'.

I associate Anssi Räisänen with the ALAN system and with well thought-out puzzles in a relatively compact game setting. I generally enjoy these games.

This game was pretty fun but its main attraction was also its main drawback for me.
The idea is that in this game, proverbs are magic. So something like 'a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush' could (theoretically) transform a bird in your hand into two in a nearby bush (this example isn't in the game).

This is a brilliant concept and when it works out it works out well. For me, though, I had trouble trying to sift through all such sayings, even when a list of many of them was given. Also such sayings have variations, many including apostrophes (which aren't allowed). For me, the 'search space' of all possible sayings was just too big.

I am glad I played, though. Also, there are a few chunks that have just normal puzzles without any sayings involved.

Now that Adrift games play online through parchment, I've been enjoying them a lot more than before.

This is an old Spring Thing game that is really very long, spread out over many years with significant puzzles and challenges in each time segment.

You are a superhero sidekick. Your boss can change shape into anything, while you can only change the shape of your hand. You also have a friend named Waterfall, a kind of overly-sexualized woman whose body is made of water.

Your main enemy is named Potter, a villain who can make sentient clay creatures.

The plotline has a lot of good elements. The paragraph-by-paragraph writing and the coding could use the help of a good editor. Near the end I was hit with a weird bug where events and conversations were printed before the room descriptions. Overall, though, this was a pretty solid story.

This was a Spring Thing game in the year I started participating in IF (2015), but I never played it originally.

It's a poem that seems to have a lot of autobiographical parts (although of course it could just be written that way). Lines of the poem can change if hovered over or clicked, and icons can appear, or words change into icons or images.

The poem (and some prose elements) is about Doggerland, a place in Northern Europe that is now submerged under water. The game also mentions things like IVF, body dysphoria (briefly), global warming, etc.

I thought it was really well done. There is one choice, as far as I saw, but a lot of interactivity.

In this Ren'py game, you play as an author who is trying to write a story about a human child and a dragon whelp.

You make choices on how to write the story, but eventually you get stuck, so you go back and write something different.

This ends up mostly being a binary tree, which you can view on a map, although there are some convergences. It turns out though that you can get ideas in one branch that unlock new options in another.

There is a lot of sameness in trying to lawnmower every branch, and having both story text and commentary on the bottom meant I often forgot to read the commentary. But the main story was cute and I liked the overall concept.

This game looked familiar to me, so I know I've seen it, but for some reason I never played it. I think I assumed it had explicit content (which it doesn't, although it does have intense events and adult situations intermingled with romance, so maybe I made assumptions).

It's really well-written, as any fan of Harris Powell-Smith might expect. You play as a cob in a kind of cyber future who has to go to a nightclub to see their informant. Their is an emphasis on emotions, sensory descriptions, and music.

It's a texture game and pretty short, but there are a lot of options and it felt like I had real agency, whether that was an illusion or not. A lot of effort went into customizing the 'hover' message when dragging actions over objects.

A nice, short game.

This is an exceptional story for Fallen London, which fits into the overall storyline and mechanics but has its own mini storyline, and is available to subscribers or for individual purchase.

I had mixed feelings going into this. Gavin Inglis has written some very good stuff, but I saw that this story had slipped low in the overall 'best exceptional stories' poll on reddit.

The idea is that Mr Pages (the master in charge of books) is upset about a new book of poetry that has been written about a mythical city called Ys. Some think that Ys is a standin for the bazaar!

My hopes dimmed for this story as I hit a very long segment that was a kind of repetitive chase. It took a big chunk of actions and didn't have much variation (although I did like a part involving trenches).

But the part after the chase where you have a chance to peruse the books was honestly very funny, I got a good chuckle out of it, and it made me feel better about the story overall.

If anyone reading this hasn't tried this author's game Hana Feels, I can recommend it! It's a nice heartfelt story about self-harm written as a government project.