Reviews by Dan Fabulich

The core twist of Type Help and Incident is the thunderclap.

When someone dies by thunderclap, almost everyone completely forgets that the dead person ever existed. Everyone's minds fill in the gaps with plausible details (as plausible as possible), and they tend to avoid thinking too hard about the gaps that are really inexplicable.

But, inevitably, someone will remember the person who most recently died, and then their memories all come flooding back (including remembering that they didn't remember the person briefly, which is usually pretty upsetting in its own right). Whoever remembers the previously dead person will die by thunderclap a few minutes later, making a "chain" of people.

(It's never revealed in the story why the thunderclaps happen, or how they work; the characters call it a "curse." It certainly seems supernatural.)

The curse makes it difficult for characters inside the story to reason out what's happening, and, in the structure of the game, it makes it more difficult for the player to logic out what happened. The player naturally assumes that if John knows something at 06, he will continue to know it at time 07; if he says that he doesn't know something, the player assumes that John must be lying to cover up a secret.

In Type Help, this ties back to the frame story of @, the previous owner of the laptop that you're exploring. @ is lonely. @ has no friends, no family, nobody who cares about him, and in 00-final-note, @ has come to realize what has happened to him and why. Someone (a commanding officer, perhaps) must have assigned @ the job precisely because @ has no one in the world who cares about him.

@'s loneliness manifests in @ behaving in all sorts of weird and creepy ways. He puts all sorts of weird personal emotional stuff in his commentary, because he has no one to talk to, no one to tell it to except these notes.

The most glaringly creepy is the hangman game with no "correct" letters, inevitably ending in an ASCII drawing of a hanged man, with the message, "You did your job. The world is safer now."

But surely the creepiest of all is the hidden file 00-dream, which you can only find by guessing the file based on his mentioning "the dead bodies strewn about like in that terrifying dream I mentioned" in 21-CH-3.

00-dream does not describe dead bodies strewn about; it simply includes the lyrics of Because of You by Lee Sims, and its player piano code "43092". You can use that to find the YouTube version of the player-piano playing the song, a cheerful, upbeat tune.

Self-playing "player pianos" are inherently creepy in their own right. The keys are moving as if the piano is being played by a ghost. They're often not tuned perfectly, creating an eerie dissonance in their performance. Secret player pianos figure regularly in parlor-room murder mysteries, where the characters wrongly assume that if the piano was playing, someone must have been playing it, when, in fact, the piano was playing itself.

And there's something kinda sad and lonely about player pianos. You're listening to a machine mechanically perform a piano piece, instead of making a real connection to the performer and their performance.

Furthermore, @ has hidden a secret in 00-dream: he's italicized some of the letters. If you transcribe them, they spell out iaMricHaRDloNglEY. Once you realize, as the player, what you're doing, you've realized that you've doomed yourself. Now you remember Richard Longley. Now you are the next person to die in the chain, and perhaps countless others will die after you because of it. You could have stopped once you'd spelled out iamrichar, but you just couldn't help yourself, could you? You just had to know, and now look what you've done?!

In Incident, you start at the front door of Galley House; the door is locked. You read the newspaper, and the door is unlocked. Inside, there's a note on the machine, and then there isn't, and then there's a new note. Whenever you look away from the machine (to crank the generator), something has changed.

As it unfolds, you discover that your character, Reya, arrived at Galley House with a bunch of people. The door didn't unlock itself. The other people unlocked it. But then they got thunderclapped, one by one, and so the game plays out from the thunderclapped perspective, notes magically appearing on the machine that were, in fact, directly handed to you by people you can no longer remember.

A nifty premise! But… there's something implausible about it, especially the scan of the "Prototype Machine" in the evidence. When you first look at that scan, there's no one in that photo at all. Then, when you discover scenes involving Sam Moors, he starts appearing in the photo, when he wasn't there before.

Then, later, when you discover Ervin Dolsky, he doesn't just appear in the photo; he also suddenly starts appearing in the machine. Scenes where he didn't appear, suddenly he does appear. This leads you to discover that he's intentionally chaining people together to try to clean up all the loose ends, ending with himself.

This makes no sense; that's not how the curse works. The thunderclap doesn't force people ignore physical evidence of the person's existence. Martha saw photos of her husband, and saw him in those photos. (If it forced people to ignore physical evidence, they'd presumably have to ignore the handed-off notes themselves.)

After discovering (and presumably remembering) Ervin, Reya doesn't then die. Reya sets the house on fire, permanently ending the chain. The Incident at Galley House has a melancholy but hopeful ending. Perhaps now, the entire chain has truly been put to rest.

Ervin Dolsky is sort of a creepy loner, but he's not alone; he's a a murderer who has several friends and colleagues, and he kills them one by one to save the world. He gives a tragic but villainous suicidal monologue in his final scene.

The theme of Richard's true loneliness, of the ineffectual creepiness that his loneliness inspires in him, is completely gone. Ervin accomplishes all of his goals. Richard accomplished nothing, not even saving the world, because we went digging through his laptop.

Playing Type Help feels like being Richard Longley. Playing Incident doesn't feel like being Reya.

Creepy horror stories end with a surprising but inevitable twist that the horror is still out there. Type Help does that; Incident doesn't.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.