Reviews by Dan Fabulich
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This is a very large game, with a lot of puzzles. But none of the puzzles felt especially cool. The game felt to me like an affordable all-you-can-eat buffet, where you can eat your fill of decent but unmemorable food.
Most of my feedback here is negative; I think I'd give it four stars if issues like the ones below were fixed.
Searching and looking under everything is painfully dull
The game begins with this "note for the player":
This adventure game is very much "old school" in that the gameplay involves having to SEARCH objects and/or LOOK BEHIND, IN or UNDER objects to find objects that you will need during the game. You might also have to EXAMINE WALL to find something on it. The game is also quite long and there is the possibility of sudden death. There is also some mild adult content.
If you do not like this style of adventure gameplay then regrettably this game may not be for you.
I don't think it's right to characterize this approach to SEARCH as "old school." None of the Zork games use the verb SEARCH. A few Infocom games like Ballyhoo support SEARCH as an alternate way to LOOK IN something that's obviously a container, but you never need to SEARCH stuff to find something hidden.
I generally object to SEARCH as a "puzzle" mechanic because it's inherently boring. Most parser games already require you to exhaustively EXAMINE every notable thing in every room. In games that require SEARCH, there's usually no clue/hint about what you need to search, so you just have to SEARCH everything after you've EXAMINEd it. What's the point?
I've said elsewhere that, in my opinion, a good puzzle solution should be surprising but inevitable in hindsight. Ideally, I won't immediately see the solution to the puzzle, but once I figure out the solution, I'll slap my forehead and say "ah, I should have known!" SEARCH puzzles are never like that. Once I know that the solution is to SEARCH every notable object, finding something when I SEARCH is never surprising or delightful.
But this game makes it that much worse, because you don't just have to SEARCH everything. You also have to LOOK UNDER and LOOK IN things, when SEARCH should have accomplished that.
In Longhouse
You are in the village longhouse, where the people of Starhollow gather for socialising. There are lots of tables, chairs and benches for people to sit on. Double doors lead Out to the lane outside and the kitchen is to the West.> x tables
What villagers sit at when eating meals or playing games, etc. On one of the tables you see some food.> search tables
You search the tables but find nothing of interest.> look under tables
You look under one of the tables and find a length of thin rope, which you pick up.
You can't get out of the starting village of Starhollow without finding a bunch of mandatory items this way. It makes interacting with the game feel like a huge slog. Every time you see a thing, you must first EXAMINE it, then SEARCH it, then LOOK IN/LOOK UNDER it, over and over and over. When I got stuck, it usually turned out that there was something I'd remembered to SEARCH but forgotten to also LOOK at using the right preposition.
The sex scene is not for everybody (perhaps hardly anybody)
About 60% of the way through the game, you'll encounter a mermaid, silently beckoning to you as she swims underwater. You can't follow her at first; you have to solve a puzzle to get to her underwater grotto.
When you get to her grotto, she gives you an important quest item. Then, she magically turns her tail into legs, and immediately and automatically has sex with you, in a "fade to black" sex scene with no detail or interactivity.
(Spoiler - click to show)Underground Grotto
You are standing in a grotto deep underground. The mermaid that you saw earlier is sitting on a rock nearby. The walls of the grotto sparkle from thousands of jewels that are embedded in the rock. The water in the grotto glows brightly with a soft white light that reflects off the walls of the grotto.
"Welcome to my grotto," the mermaid greets you in a bubbly kind of voice. "I expect you are wondering why I asked you here?" she says, enigmatically.
"Yes," you reply. "I did wonder why I am here?"
"I know why you are here, Alyas of Starhollow," she tells you. "The thief has taken the Pipe of Rummkub to the sorcerer who lives in the castle aboveground, the evil Xarkzis. If you wish to defeat him and recover the Pipe, you will need this charm, the Amulet of Acara, as protection against magic spells."
She takes an amulet from where it was hanging on a thong around her neck, hands it to you and you hang it around your neck. "Whatever you do, never take it off," she warns you.
Your eyes then go wide as her fish-like tail shimmers mysteriously and transforms into two shapely legs. She gets to her feet, walks over to you and puts her hands around your neck.
"Now, Alyas of Starhollow; I am Thalassa and I am in need of a man," she says, kissing you on the lips and pressing her voluptuous naked body against yours, evoking an instant reaction from yourself. You then retire to Thalassa's chambers and fulfil her needs.
After a couple of hours of love making you both fall asleep.
When you wake up, you find yourself laying on the grass by the round pond next to your clothes. You get to your feet and put them on.
I don't think this level of adult content will please anybody.
I think many players will be turned off by automatically having sex with a mermaid we just met, without even a "(y/n)" question to decide whether to participate.
Players who do find this sexual encounter rewarding will prefer more explicit detail. Adult IF is a thing people enjoy; if you want to write it, then write it. But a "fade to black" sex scene that starts by surprise and ends on a single, non-interactive page is, I claim, nobody's cup of tea.
Even the bit of detail we get about this scene only characterizes the mermaid as an object of sexual desire. Is Alyas sexy? If so, the game has literally nothing to say about that. If you're not into having sex with women, there is nothing for you here.
I think the author intended this scene to be a "reward" to the player for playing this far, but I found it unrewarding. Anyone who wants romance in their AIF, anyone who wants explicit detail in their AIF, anyone who wants interactivity in their AIF, and anyone who's not into sex with women will be unrewarded.
Cruel, perhaps accidentally
The game has hundreds of rooms; the map is divided into zones. Progressing to the next "zone" is normally the primary objective in each area.
Leaving the first zone, the village of Starhollow, the game's narrator intervenes, refusing to let you leave unless you have all of the mandatory items. ("There's something that was in your yort that you haven't got.")
But the game will cheerfully let you forget to bring objects from the very next zone. You can just miss the ball of string, hop on a ferry to the far side of the lake, and you'll be completely stuck, unable to finish the game, and unable to figure out why you can't finish the game.
This is so "cruel" in the Zarfian Cruelty Scale that I think it may have been a bug. If the narrator had said "There's something in the woods that you haven't got" when trying to board the ferry, that would have made the game much better.
We played this game (Release 1, 260628) at the SF Bay IF Meetup; we had to consult the walkthrough to win, due to parser issues.
Except for the parser issues, the puzzles were decent, and the game has its charms.
(Spoiler - click to show)
- Rope: If you try to climb the rope, it says, "You awkwardly start to climb the rope, but it swings about like a pendulum and you start to feel giddy, so you jump back down." This sounds like you're supposed to secure the bottom, loose end of the rope, e.g. with the anchor you find in the same room, but if you try to "tie anchor to rope" when the rope is still attached to the mast, it says, "If you want to tie the rope to anything, you’ll have to untie it from the top of the mast first." But, that's not how ropes should work… you can tie two different ends to things. We did eventually figure out to chop the mast with the axe, but it was a frustrating experience. I think it should let you tie the rope to the anchor before detaching it from the mast, and even let you climb the rope, but it should say that there's nothing at the top of the rope. Describing the rope + anchor as a grappling hook will make it clear that you need to take the rope away.
- Bees: You're supposed to smoke the bees out, but if you bring wood to the bees and light it with the candle, the game says, "Fortunately for the bees, the wood is dry and there’s no smoke." (It says this even for rotten wood found in a boat covered with moss, which seems implausible.) You can bring water to the beehive in a jug, but if you try to "put water on wood" before lighting the fire, it will say "You can't put things on top of that"; if you "pour water on wood" it will say "When you turn the jug upside down, the water soaks into the ground." You're supposed to use water only after the fire is lit, with "put/pour water on fire", but we had to reach for the walkthrough to solve this; it seems like that should extinguish the flames, rather than creating smoky fire.
- Goat: The goat refuses to eat the honeycomb with the message, "They say that a goat will eat anything, but it won’t eat a chunk of honeycomb." Goats absolutely will eat honeycomb. The game really wants you to give grass to the goat, but I think there should be a better excuse not to give honeycomb to the goat, even just "Honeycomb is too precious to give to a goat" or something like that.
- Grass: You can only get grass in the goat path, but there's nothing special about grass; you can't cut the bushes or other plants that a goat might reasonably munch on anywhere else.
- Books: You can't read the books, but one book "seems out of place." But there's no way to directly refer to that book, pick it up, or do anything with it. "get book" always just says "You pick a book at random and it somehow slides back onto the shelf," as if to say "you didn't specify the specific book that matters" but, in fact, no book matters, and there's nothing to do here at all. It would be clearer if the game didn't mention a "random book", and if books and scrolls did the same "tingle" effect.
- Doors: The game never auto-opens doors, like the back/front door of your shack, which is annoying.
A Kansas City Shuffle, July 4, 2026The puzzles were solid and fair, and I enjoyed the writing.
It's hard to talk about this game without spoilers, so...
(Spoiler - click to show)I loved the unfolding layers of the endings. It's a delightful common trope in heist stories that the heist turns out to be not what you think it is, and pulling it off twice is really fun.
I wish hints had covered all three parts of the game. I guess it's quite common to have hints only for the mandatory parts of a game, and no hints for the optional parts, but that's frustrating, because the optional parts are usually harder (and often less fair), so I'd encourage authors not to do it this way.
Another thought: having freedom of action at the end of the game to talk to the big Boss made me think there was a puzzle / easter egg to find there. I tried to EMPATHIZE with the Boss, but it gave me an inappropriate message, "You detect only vague impressions. The boss said that most of the robbers aren’t in a relationship, so that makes sense." The Boss isn't a robber, so that doesn't make sense.
I searched the strings of the game with glulx-strings and didn't see anything interesting to find there; I suggest not having that last turn, or to have one last easter egg worth finding.
I believe this game hasn't been beta tested. (No beta testers are credited.) That means the game is incomplete.
Room exits are unlabeled. The primary puzzle of the game is inexplicable. Even playing through near the walkthrough, I couldn't make sense of what the game's objective was supposed to be, or how to solve it.
The main puzzle puts you in contact with an item called "Untitled." Inexplicably, you have to (Spoiler - click to show)hit untitled to win the game.
I don't think this game can be solved without reading its walkthrough.
Good puzzles, fun NPCs. I particularly liked the interaction with (Spoiler - click to show)the moon at the end of the game.
It can be a little hard to notice items to pick up in the room descriptions (but I guess that's intentional on the author's part).
At the start of the game, you get assigned three cryptids to capture, with three clues each. Most of the clues are ambiguous, applying to more than one cryptid, and/or hard to interpret. You can (and should) review all of the cryptids and all of the photos before picking three of them to capture.
My first few tries, I got only 2 out of 3; only in the final attempt did I get 3 out of 3. The replying process felt frustrating, especially since the game doesn't tell you which cryptid you got wrong. At no point did I say, "oh, of course, I should have known that the right answer was X instead of Y."
There are plot choices in the ending, which was nice.
It's a ~5,000-word non interactive poem, with just a handful of words per line, across 1,742 lines.
The POV character is depressed, and finds day-to-day life pointless and meaningless. I felt like it made its point in the first 1,000 words.
The puzzles are pure self-contained puzzles, mostly word puzzles, mostly unconnected to the theme/story. The story is cute. We played it in a group and the SF IF Meetup, and we had a good time with it.
Be sure to play the Vorple version on the author's website, which includes fun font stuff and color changes.
This game was developed under time crunch as part of the IronCHIF competition. The prompt was "a scroll that alters the world around it." This game has that! And a ton of puzzles to solve. Puzzles interwoven on top of other puzzles.
My only complaint is the mechanic at the end game.
(Spoiler - click to show)Near the end of the game, you have to solve a bunch of puzzles via a sliding tiles puzzle. The game asks you to line up certain specific tiles all in a row, and it is an enormous pain in the butt to do it. There are tricks to solving it, but it's kinda like the Towers of Hanoi, where you have to count very carefully; if you mess it up, you'll ruin your own hard work.
It's a "kinetic novel," where you don't make any choices. (You can click "auto" to make the game autoplay, revealing the text without human interaction.)
That's fine, but the art feels like it's stuff pulled off of Google image search, and blurred so it wouldn't be obviously out of place in this game.
In a kinetic novel, the art needs to support the text, and I feel like the art is just there because the author felt like "there ought to be art here."
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