Reviews by Dan Fabulich
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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."
It's a fresh take on vampires, which is impressive in its own right.
It has no plot choices, but it still relies on interactivity, with cycling links that affect your viewpoint of the story, and a bunch of optional links to explore side notes. It feels like you're driving, even if the story is on rails.
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