Reviews by MathBrush

**Why Pout?** by Andrew Schultz

Andrew Schultz has a long history of making wordplay games which all follow the same general pattern (typing words based on an overarching wordplay theme using words that appear in the location) as well as a large repertoire of other games (like chess games and even a baseball game).

His longest running series, called 'Prime Pro-Rhyme Row', involves rhyming pairs of words. While fun, I had the feeling it was getting mined out.

This game takes on a fresh mechanic that still involves two-word pairs. Unlike the rhyming games, which could be slowly brute-forced by trying each letter of the alphabet and then adding multi-consonant starters, this puzzle type (which I won't spoil just in case) can be solved through multiple means, including auditory and mechanical, but with much less possible lawnmowering.

That's not to say it's trivial. I did use hints a couple of times. It turned out one puzzle was there that I didn't even realize was a puzzle that was gating all the others.

Anyway, the story here is mostly surreal, with a sequence of random, fantastical things that don't exactly fit a coherent narrative, but the overarching plot is heartwarming and fun: you're collecting friends. In different areas you find people that need help, and, in return, they help you solve more of your puzzles, and can give you pep talks as well.

This is a lot of fun. The pep talks can be nice, too. Some are more general and vague:

> The ________ discusses ways to identify people or situations that justneed a bit of help, and how to do so without making them feel
> hopeless or in need of help, or that they got themselves in this
> position in the first place.

while others are more concrete:

> You think up a ________ you mumble under your breath. The
> merchant finds it a bit weird you like THAT as a way to keep positive.
> It doesn’t seem like that sort of thing helps the economy. Their
> cheeriness slips slightly, with impressively-balanced potshots at
> people more and less successful than they are.

I prefer the more concrete ones, as they have a lot of character.

Overall, this was fun. Recommended for fans of wordplay parser games.

Parser games let you type in whatever you want. They only respond to a small fragment of that. If I open a random parser game and say 'I endeavor to hop on my right foot fifty-five times before squawking like a parrot', then it won't respond with meaningful feedback (I know AI can respond, but the chance of that response containing content intended by the author that directly pertains to my command is low).

This is one reason new parser players struggle; how do you know what to type?

Parser games traditionally solve this in two ways. The first is by the community adopting unspoken customs about what commands are important. By experience, players come to know that 'X ME, 'INVENTORY', 'TAKE', 'DROP', 'PUSH', 'ENTER', etc. are generally understood and work well.

The second is by giving the commands in-game, either explicitly (like limited parser games that list the required vocab) or implicitly (if the game says, 'You feel a strong desire to yodel', then you can reasonably expect to be able to yodel).

This game takes neither of those two paths. In it, you play through various related scenarios about a traffic jam in an intersection. Many, if not most, of these scenarios are solved by commands that are both unusual in parser games and which aren't provided or mentioned in-game.

That makes this game pretty hard. Adding on to that, there are some default actions that don't have responses, making it hard to know what to do.

The storyline is a fun concept, and I enjoyed the ending, but I ended up using the walkthrough for about 70% of the game. I won't elaborate too much on the story as there are some early spoilers that give much of the flavor of the game, but suffice it to say that this is a puzzle about examining a system of interconnected events and trying to figure out how to adjust them in order to save yourself.

I think the game could benefit from responses to an ABOUT command to give expectations to the player. While I personally would have also liked more nudges in-game or a better idea of necessary commands, I realize that that may not match the author's vision and that they may have directly desired for players to have to hunt and experiment for a while. If that's the case, I think it's fine to leave it as-is.

This is a twine game with three different paths about a group uniting to defeat a powerful vampire. You can play from three perspectives.

I can sum up my reaction to this game by saying I loved the story, liked the mechanics but found a lot of typos and bugs.

The story (from the point of view of a new vampire, which I chose first) is that you are recently-graduated art student whom a powerful vampire lord has turned into a fledgling vampire. You are captured by a human-vampire-cooperative group called the Redjackets, and together decide to take down your lord.

The game boasts three perspectives and allows a variety of both emotional/roleplaying choices together with choices that affect the overall story.

I liked the atmosphere and dialog of the game. There were numerous minor typos, though, and several passages with broken Twine code. The very first screen said 'error' on it (due to some code that checks your previous playthroughs); several times, the text was from the wrong perspective; the face of one of the characters got duplicated once, instead of showing two people; and the game said it would remember my choices when doing the next path but I saw my former character take all the choices that I didn't take.

However, none of these bugs really prevent the playing of the game itself or the enjoyment of the story. So I still like the game overall, I just want to be complete in my review when describing it all.

I do want to call out the color scheme and UI as being especially nice-looking (for my tastes).

**Verses** by Kit Riemer

This was a hard game to play, but not for the usual reasons. It wasn't difficult in a puzzly way and it didn't make me feel bad inside.

This game was hard to play because the text really made me have to think to understand it, to try to piece together everything, to absorb the different layers of meaning going on.

Here's an example. The links in this game are colored differently, with one mostly representing 'forward motion' and the others side details which are placed below the main text. These side details take the form of definitions and can vary from mundane to metaphorical, often one right after the other. Here's a snippet I clipped:

(Spoiler - click to show)
air: the chill makes you shiver.
smoke: something becoming something else.
meat: how would it feel to be cooked?


So I felt like I was wrestling with a hydra, trying to take on this game on multiple narrative levels at once.

I failed, I think. I can only identify the surface themes in this story, alas.

Which is why I've delayed describing the story so far, because I'm not sure I can.

As far as I can tell, it's set in a different timeline than ours where biological modification is common and words usually reserved for religion are applied to other mysterious phenomena.

You are an analyst, which seems to be a job involving organic, technological and spiritual components. You are assigned into the middle of nowhere with little company in a rotting building. Every day you're asked to analyse, partly using the computer and partly using your own intuition. The whole process actually just now reminded me of accounts of Joseph Smith's translation of the Book of Mormon, first using a tool designed by God for the purpose before later relying on it less.

Analysis seems to be all about interpreting the words that come to you, but those words are unclear at first. Simultaneously, the game includes many translations of poems, going into great detail of the difficulties in preserving metaphor, beauty, rhyme scheme and tone between Hungarian, Romanian, and English. It was fun learning a bit of Romanian (I saw a word for claw or hoof that looked like 'ungulate'). The protagonist takes special pride in translating poems with good meter.

The translation and the analysis seem to go hand in hand, but of the rest of the story, what does it mean? I visit a farm which I've already heard rumours about, and find (Spoiler - click to show)masses of bioflesh with human organs waiting to be harvested. As I translate more, I (Spoiler - click to show)lose my humanity, my eye, my leg, my ability to speak. I consume the flesh of the unholy and the dead. What does it mean? It feels almost like Kafka's "In der Strafkolonie", with its vivid and violent semi-religious imagery with no explicit moral or meaning.

I don't think this is a game meant to be enjoyed in a brief time to serve as entertainment; it feels like something designed to provoke thought, like someone deliberately crafted something to cause as much pondering as possible.

As a final note, what I think is going on with analysis is that (Spoiler - click to show)the biscuits you consume are pieces of waste extruded by long-dead aliens that preserve some of their consciousness, which you slowly become attuned to at the price of your own body and mind. They appreciate this as it grants them some freedom, but you yourself lose everything.

In any case, definitely a game worth checking out. I found a small bug where I had to click on some links repeatedly before they worked, but it's been passed on to the author and a workaround may be available. I wouldn't let that stop you from playing, though, it worked well for me even with that.

This is a windows executable game in a custom system. It runs in the command line but also has pop-up windows with html-style formatting for things like hints and pictures.

It describes itself as an old-school 80’s type game with minimal story and mostly puzzles, several of them timed.

The idea is that you are on a mission to help rescue a kidnapped girl but your plane crashes near a pyramid and you find out the kidnapper, a shaman, died and the girl has disappeared.

The game is ultra-minimalistic in text. For instance, the description of the first room is:

You are in the desert.
So from here I can go north south or east.

I see the plane.

Wandering around, there are several interesting things, like a foggy area called 'Perdition" and a strange altar.

I had some trouble with the parser. Early on, I was trying to answer the phone, and I had the following exchange:

I see the plane
Incoming video call…
What now Me?
> answer call
Ok.
Incoming video call…
What now Me?
> i
You Own:
a mobile phone
Incoming video call…
What now Me?
> x phone
Let’s see…
Incoming call 0331785692
What now Me?
> push answer
But… the cell phone isn’t ringing
What now Me?

My character’s name was Me because the way the game asked for my name was:

Are you the chosen one?
Who knocks at this door?

and I answered ‘Me’.

Sometimes when I got an error in the game, no matter what my next move was, the error would repeat. For instance:

> x mantle
MANTLE ? It’s not relevant now.
What now Brian?
> go in house
MANTLE ? It’s not relevant now.
What now Brian?
>

There is a help system, that first gives your a kind of riddle hint and then an explicit action. In many places, the only hint is a picture of a mummified hand and the phrase “Do you want a hand? Not now…;-)”. In others it’s more explicit. The hints often refer to things that aren’t in the room description, like walls.

I was able to get into a house with drawings in it, and the hints include a picture with a reversed message, but at that point I got stuck. I’d be happy to try again with a full walkthrough, or if anyone else can get past that point.

The best parts of this game were the cool audio messages and the very nice drawings; very nice additions for a custom command line parser!

While I am giving a 1-star vote at this time, I don't think the game is horrible. It's just that my criteria are:
polish (where the game could use some more commands it understands),
interactivity (where I was lost on what to do a lot),
descriptiveness (the game uses a minimalist style),
emotional impact (which I do think is good and is worth a star with the cool pictures), and
would I play again? (and right now I do not feel that way).

I'd be happy to bump it up one star if the author requests it, but right now those are my feelings.

This game was the only game entered in Spring Thing 2020's Late Harvest, designed to accomodate designers who were unable to complete their games in time for Spring Thing due to Covid.

It's a parser game with a long sequence of almost-identical rooms, each with different puzzles in them. The puzzles can repeat, and I believe in the long run that all of the rooms are procedurally generated in some way with common elements in them.

There is a bit of a twist, which I saw in the Club Floyd transcript and which was hinted. Explicitly, (Spoiler - click to show)You can TOUCH WALLS to go through them and end up in a story segment that you have little control over.

Overall, the plot was interesting, as were the puzzles, but both were a bit threadbare. Not bad at all for a first game, though.

This game has been on my 'to play' list for several years. It was one of the earliest Spring Thing games, in fact one of 4 games in the first year that Spring Thing had more than one entrant.

I've made a Sherlock Holmes parser game before and for me it was really hard to keep it from being 'type exactly what sherlock did in the story to progress'. I don't think I really succeeded.

And I don't think this game does either, although it had different goals than mine. It begins with an extended sequence of giving yourself cocaine, and then becomes a 'guess the next part of the book' sequence, with large chunks of text directly from the book (just like I did).

But after some point, it becomes very different. Sherlock burns with anger; an assassin is sent after him. And Sherlock decides to (Spoiler - click to show)blow up a ship.

I don't think this game is really possible without a walkthrough. The help menu gives many detailed ways to talk to people but you actually have to do very different things (like (Spoiler - click to show)hire willis instead of using ASK ABOUT or TALK TO or TELL.

It was a wild story in the end, but it makes a lot more sense than the original story, which was one of the duller Sherlock Holmes stories.

This game uses a similar engine to the author’s last game, Steal 10 Treasures to Win This Game, with some differences. Both only allow a set collection of inputs; nothing else can even be entered. So, error messages are replaced by just not allowing you to type things. However, the older game only uses single letters for inputs. This game lets you type longer words, and does have little responses explaining why you can’t do some things.

The game is set in the fictional land of Yurf, where a royal conflict has divided the world and four gems have been lost. You need to explore the world, which has a surreal Alice in Wonderland/Phantom Tollbooth feel.

The parser is one-word only. This makes the game simpler but also harder. I appreciated the reduced number of actions I had to try. On the other hand, I was frustrated by simple things like trying to look at one person in a group of three, checking my inventory or interacting with individual background items.

The one-word parser has been stretched to its limits here, and that means one thing: riddles. Around half or more of the games puzzles are intuition-based or ‘aha’ type riddles, where instead of manipulating physical objects or learning a system you have to sit and puzzle it out. I ended up having to use hints twice. While I typically enjoy riddles less than other styles of gameplay, they made sense both storywise and given the input constraints.

Overall, a polished and good-looking game, well-written and mostly bug-free (I passed on a typo and a sequence-breaking bug to the author).

This game was written in the mainframe language Rexx, designed to be played on an emulator.

It features ASCII art, used to make 12 playing cards. The point of the game is to collect the cards. It’s based on the story The Garden Behind the Moon by Howard Pyle, with a Moon House and a Moon Man and Moon Angel.

Gameplay is primarily menu based, with some menu options giving you a word you can type out.

There are only 6 things you can do:
-Buy cards from the moon man (from $5 to $120)
-Sleep
-Visit the moon angel (in the code, this is supposed to make him more friendly, but the code that does that never actually runs, locking you out of part of the game)
-Look out the window
-polish stars (this gives you $5_
-visit the garden (only open once a week, gives random text).

So, the only way to make money is $5 at a time, with sleep in between each money-making event, and a little animation that plays when you polish the stars, and you have to do that 64 times to get all cards. Furthermore, you have to wait another 20 days or so to actually beat the game.

I didn’t finish the game all the way through, opting to read the code instead. The ascii art is lovely, but I don’t want to just repeat the same text over and over again for the cards; the gameplay is just too simple, I think.

This Twine game is intended to simulate a forensics-focused whodunnit.

You play as a detective investigating a woman who has been found dead in her apartment after several days. You have the opportunity to take hair, blood, and print samples, analyse medication, interview others, retrieve info from a smartphone, etc.

You yourself are nobody, a cipher, while the suspects are primarily interesting in the information they give rather than their unique characteristics.

There is a lot of technical info in this game, and a ton of links to methodically click through. It has the same kind of puzzle structure as in Toby's Nose, where you read all the info, come to the conclusion, and guess the suspect off a list.

I guessed the suspect wrong but had the cause of death right. It was a fun cerebral exercise, and I would play another game like this. If there were any room for improvement, it might be in making the characters have more unique and interesting features and personalities.