Reviews by Dan Fabulich

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!

Don't make the mistake I made, of reading all of the written metatext material in the GUIDE before you start playing.

Instead, just start by typing PS 1 to read the first footnote. (Whenever you see footnotes in brackets, e.g. [CAS 1], you can type the text in brackets to read the footnote.)

The first footnote includes a tutorial, allowing you to start playing and familiarize yourself with the characters before you dive into the metatext.

(Unfortunately, some of the metatext implies that you need to read the metatext first, and in particular, that you need to read every page of the metatext just to find out how to read footnotes, to find out how to access the tutorial. IMO, this is a bug in the tutorial, and I hope it gets fixed.)

I, myself, really didn't enjoy this game, because I spent an hour scrutinizing the metatext before engaging with the characters.

But you won't make that mistake. You'll like this game much more than I did, because you read this review.