Reviews by Dan Fabulich

This game is pretty clever, and I enjoyed the majority of it. If you enjoyed Counterfeit Monkey, I think you'll enjoy this, too.

The game gives you a portable "reverser" gun, allowing you to reverse words. (You can do this in Counterfeit Monkey, too, but only in one particular location. Here, you can do it anywhere.)

The puzzles are fun and zany, as Counterfeit Monkey's puzzles often are.

I had three areas where I think the game would benefit from improvement.

First, this game is much more like Counterfeit Monkey than it is like Spider and Web, the other game that's it's listed as being "inspired by." I think alluding to Spider and Web is probably unwise, because it sets players up (it set me up) to expect a game like Spider and Web, and that's just not what this is.

I'll make some remarks about this here that are not spoilery for Retool Looter, but are mildly spoilery for Spider and Web. (Spoiler - click to show)Spider and Web is a game fundamentally about lies and lying, reconstructing what "really" happened. Also, Spider and Web has "The Puzzle," the puzzle right before the beginning of the final act. Retool Looter has nothing like that. It starts with a metal plate next to a door, much as Spider and Web does, but you can't pick the lock using your lockpick the way you do in Spider and Web; if anything, the allusions to Spider and Web are more of a funny "gotcha! this isn't Spider and Web!!" And once you get past the first door, the game is absolutely nothing at all like Spider and Web. I think Retool Looter would be better without the metal plate next to the starting door.

Second, the game doesn't allow you to unreverse the other agents, but it really doesn't make sense why. (Spoiler - click to show)For example, consider the limes. "You have no idea which of these limes is Emil, and you're forbidden from reversing anything to create new life. You'll need to take all of them with you so that each can be analyzed with equipment that can determine which has been reversed before." But… I do have equipment that can analyze which lime has been reversed. The reverser gun itself includes a little sensor light that will tell me if there's something in the room that's been reversed. There's no in-game reason I couldn't/shouldn't just pick up the limes one at a time until the sensor light goes out. Instead, the game just doesn't let you "get lime" when you have limes, even though it does support "get part" from a pile of parts. I suggest that Kay should just say that it's dangerous to unreverse people without specialized medical or mental-health treatment.

Third, the final puzzle really needs more hinting, and perhaps some bug fixing. We played it at the IF Meetup with half a dozen people actively banging our heads on it, and we eventually just gave up. I was only able to solve it by reading wolfbiter's gameplay tips. I wish the THINK command would have helped us more at that point. (Spoiler - click to show)Specifically, you really can't make progress on the puzzle unless you think of the word "sloop," but THINK stops short of mentioning that word. And it's still not clear to me what you do and don't actually have to do to begin piloting the sloop. Is it enough to just make a sloop? Do we have to make ports? (Why?) Do we have to make pools as well as ports?

Despite all this, I did really enjoy this game. But as it stands, it's almost one of the classics… but not quite.

I couldn't win this game at its easiest difficulty, following the "Beginner's Guide" walkthrough highlighted on the game's subreddit. https://old.reddit.com/r/RedAutumnSPD/comments/1hkkt39/beginners_guide_to_social_democracy_an/

"as long as you keep implementing WTB plan, nothing you do would screw your position ... Support otto braun for president. If you kept zentrum relations good enough you'll win in a landslide." Instead, my Zentrist allies refused to enact WTB, Hitler took power at 40% unemployment, and I lost badly.

I tell you that story so as to clarify what I mean when I say that this game is hard. I probably spent about two hours with this game, taking careful notes on the Library, and playing carefully following the walkthrough, and I didn't even come close to winning.

I fully believe that if I invested six or seven hours in the game, I could eventually figure out how to win once (maybe mostly by luck?) at the easiest difficulty, and that every minute of playing it would hurt. The feeling of winning would be a sense of relief that I could finally stop playing.

With clear parallels to the US, the message of this game is one of historically informed hopelessness. It *ought* to be easy to defeat the far right, just spend money on social welfare, but the centrists will never agree to that, and so the far right will ride into power with historical inevitability, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it.

I respect that message, and I guess I'm glad that this game exists, but everything about it is unenjoyable. I feel like I wasted the time I spent trying to figure out how to win. Puzzle games need to have solutions that are surprising but inevitable in hindsight. This is a game where the solution is obvious, but where you're powerless to enact it.

Maybe I'll play it again if I find a better walkthrough, just to see what it's like to win, but I can't imagine ever enjoying this work of art.

And, that's the point of the game, I guess.

The game is a short joke, and, in my opinion, it's funny. It's absolutely worth ten seconds of your time to experience it. (Be sure to check out the author's provided walkthrough.)

Also, be sure to play with sound on, as the game includes a sound effect when you click "Play."

(The game doesn't allow you to replay when you refresh, but you can replay it by playing in an incognito/private window.)

I don't want to spoil it. Just play it blind.

(Spoiler - click to show)
It's 113 questions long, but as you get part of the way in, it teeters towards a creepypasta game with Zalgo text. But then, it changes again, and becomes a little mini choice-based adventure.

The game admits at a certain point that UQuiz doesn't support branching paths; your choices are meaningless. But that's part of the game's message, about finding meaning in the meaninglessness of existence.

It's a nice, poetic little theme set on a roller coaster ride hidden in a simplistic "What color are you?" quiz.

It's meaningless, but it's worth your time, and that's what the game is all about.

Non-interactive, except for page turns. The pacing is good, and the story is solid.

It's a poem. You interact with it with arrow keys, bumping into hotspots to see what they say. The poem is good, and the Bitsy UI and background music create good pacing.

It's designed to allow you to practice English, it says. I'm a native English speaker and tried to type reasonable responses to the questions/situation.

Sometimes it took more than 30 seconds to respond before the game replied that it didn't understand what I was saying. Frequently it said "unrecognized word," which makes sense for a traditional parser game, but it makes no sense for a game where someone's supposed to practice their English.

This is a minigame with one puzzle. The puzzle has decent clues and a solid solution. I'd say that this game is a good start, and I'd encourage the author to work on a more ambitious project in their next game.

In 2012, Ryan Veeder published "The Statue Got Me High" as part of the Apollo 18+20 tribute album project. As the game begins, it appears that you have to solve a tricky logic puzzle, but it turns out that you don't have to solve it at all.

The reveal in "The Statue Got Me High" is funny, because gathering the clues to solve a logic puzzle like that would be boring. It was surprising but inevitable in hindsight that Ryan would give us a fun game instead of a boring logic puzzle.

In contrast, the purpose of "The Little Match Girl at the Battle of the Gray Peaks" is to be boring.

You do, in fact, have to solve the logic puzzle to win this game, and it is very boring work. In fact, when you win, the game explicitly acknowledges how boring it is, as part of a bonus puzzle.

I feel like this game is a practical joke played on the player. "Ha ha, you dork, you wasted your time solving a boring logic puzzle!"

I think I wouldn't have bothered if I weren't a fan of Ryan's work in general.

In addition to solving the boring logic puzzle, there is one basically legit "aha!" puzzle here, but I think even that puzzle didn't have enough hinting. IMO, good puzzles, like good jokes, have solutions that are surprising but inevitable in hindsight, but this one wasn't.

(Spoiler - click to show)
When assigning units, when you win the war, you lose the game.

The clue to winning the game is the remark, "She had survived the war with no more than a few scratches—but she was hurt all the same, by the memories of the Reptons and dinosaurs who had suffered and perished under her orders. She would turn the problem over in her head night after night—she would realize, after a few years, exactly how she could have done better—and the knowledge would haunt her for the rest of her life."

When I read that, I read it as referring only to the Reptons and dinosaurs who were acting under her orders. That mislead me from the real solution, which is to set up seven stalemates.

The eye-blinking mechanic is wild. You've just gotta try it.

The game is short, but I think I couldn't handle an eye-blinking game any longer than this one!