Reviews by Dan Fabulich
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This game credits no author or artist. According to my browser devtools, the AI chatbot conversation is happening with an actual live LLM (Grok 4.1, from xAI / Elon Musk), but I don't think that was necessary at all for the trivial interactions you have with the bot.
I believe the art is AI generated as well, but, with no credits, I can't prove it.
The game includes one actual choice, but there's no real difference in the three endings. If you crack down on the politician, does he go to jail? Does he make us suffer? It all ends in same scene on the couch in your apartment, which makes the choice feel less important.
This is a game where a significant portion of the game requires examining objects in the scenery that don't seem very notable at first.
For example, in one room, there's an axe shaft sitting in plain sight, but look doesn't mention it. Instead, you have to examine the (Spoiler - click to show)broken window frames in that room, and only then does look reveal the object you found. Almost all of the important inventory objects and clues are hidden in this way.
The problem is, most of the examinable objects are mundane, and their descriptions are kinda boring to read, sometimes even just the default Inform "You see nothing special" message.
> x wooden shelving unit
Each of the five shelves in this unit may once have overflowed with jars of preserved food, but now they hold nothing but a layer of dust.
If the game wants me to meticulously examine everything, I want those descriptions of everything to really shine, to make me want to keep examining everything, just to see what treats the author has tucked away in every examinable object.
Or, you know, just say "you see an old axe handle here" right when I walk in. That's fine, too!
(Spoiler - click to show)Particularly galling is that when I examine floorboards in the Front Hallway, "You see nothing special," but in the Back Hallway, there's a crucial clue.
It's also a game where you sometimes have to search, but there are only two or three things worth searching in the whole game. But if you're playing without hints, you still have to try searching everything, just to make sure, which is not fun, IMO.
Once you finish examining and searching everything, the puzzles are fun and fair, and the game is written well.
Good music, solid story.
I quite enjoyed this game. The writing is cute, and the puzzles are fun.
I have some spoilerific feedback for the author.
(Spoiler - click to show)I got stuck pretty hard on the oojamaflip puzzle. The game repeatedly pointed out with a parenthetical that the oojamaflip was relevant, but the encouraging words from Trala made it seem like a victorious status effect, rather than a puzzle to actively solve. And the solution, to use the gizmo, felt unclued. For most of the other inventory items, there's at least one other way to use it that gives you some clue about what it's for, but not the gizmo. The gizmo only works on the oojamaflip; only the gizmo does anything with the oojamaflip. Even after replaying, I have no clear idea how I was supposed to guess that. The gizmo and the oojamaflip seem to have nothing in particular in common; neither of them have any defined shape. I had to pray to get the hint to use the gizmo, which I then lawnmowered to solve the oojamaflip puzzle. I think the gizmo should do something somewhere else, to give me some kind of hint on what it could be good for, and/or one of the other items should do something with the oojamaflip, pointing me in the direction of the gizmo.
I also got stuck on the very last puzzle in the treasure room. I didn't realize that the "gold and jewels" were "gold" and "jewels," separably examinable. I'm not at all sure that this was a puzzle worth having. Making "treasure," "gold," and "jewels" synonymous would have let me just pick a treasure and move on.
More broadly, I think this game would benefit from bolding stuff that you can fly towards, and it would benefit from an HTML version that you could click on or tap on on mobile phones. (Dialog is great for that sort of thing!) For example, if the treasure description had said, "The platform is heaped with gold and jewels," I would have understood what to do.
This game does actually contain a hidden Nazi mode. (Apparently it took quite a few years to figure this out.) You can follow David Welbourn's walkthrough to find how to unlock it.
None of the reviews here explicitly mentioned that, so I wanted to make sure someone did.
The game is sort of a practical joke. FormerlyHiddenNaziMode.zip contains a deceptive PDF, Hidden Nazi Mode: Anatomy of a Failure, falsely claiming that the author has removed the Nazi stuff, and providing an incorrect command to activate Nazi mode. The zip also contains deceptive source code, which does not contain a hidden mode. (That source code is not the real source code used to build the zblorb file in the zip.)
You visit some locations, spin some text options to your preferred option, then "seal" your choices to commit to them. I think the order of locations and the spin text has effect on the poetry.
Everything was so surreal and metaphorical that I don't think I really got a message from this game. But the language was lovely enough that I could enjoy the feeling of the poetry washing over me, uncomprehended.
The game includes a lot of wise, well-regarded remarks on how to get through a breakup, and attempts to simulate the effect of a friend or therapist to help a you to feel seen and heard. It didn't do much for me, but it could help someone else.
I think the achievements were mostly distracting. They cluttered up the screen, forcing me to click on all of them to dismiss them and continue. There are so many, it felt like a parody of achievements, but, if it was a joke, I didn't find it funny, and if not, I'm not sure what the point of them was.
(One thing the game didn't consider: I'm still friends with the person I imagined for the purposes of this game.)
If you dally too long in this game, a seagull poops on your jacket, and you lose. Why?
Eventually, you walk. You move an average of 100 steps per walk. You start with around 7,000 steps in your score, and you have to get to 10,000 steps. After you walk five times, you have to do something besides walking (breathe or just wait) or you'll immediately lose.
You might find this game more efficient to play using periods to run multiple commands in one step: walk. walk. walk. walk. walk. breathe. Then use up arrow to do it again.
At the end, there's a trivial puzzle. (Spoiler - click to show)A red object on the beach, which you have to take in order to examine it. If you don't take it, you'll lose. When you go west, you meet a crying child. You win if you give the child the car, and you lose immediately if you leave without doing so.
What was the point of this story? The walking is boring. Is that the point? That exercise in old age is tedious? The puzzle is trivial, and the auto-lose feature of the game is frustrating. Is it the point that old age is pretty frustrating?
The game even has the cruelty to forbid undo, even when it'll kill you dead just for walking the wrong way at the ending, forcing you to redo the entire hike if you didn't think to save. Why??
Solid, September 6, 2025Interactivity makes this short story more powerful.
Online, I've heard some commenters ask, mostly in bad faith, why Palestinians who had the option to move wouldn't simply move. These commenters seem not to be able to imagine what could be worth staying for. Playing the role of something worth staying for makes this point elegantly.
You can probably get to the end just guessing water/leaves until you reach your current season's goal, but there's also an interesting randomized optimization puzzle here, too. (I got lucky once and generated more than 30 lbs of olives.)
A bug report: At the end, it gives you a standard menu, "Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, QUIT or UNDO the last command?" But if you try to undo, it says that "undo" is forbidden. But save/restore work, so I'm not sure it's meaningful to forbid undo. Might as well just allow undo, IMO, or block save/restore also, if you insist.
There's not a lot to this game as yet. I think it would have been a decent entry into IntroComp.
You click around, escape your bedroom, meet a mysterious NPC, and… that's the end of part 1, five minutes later.
Still, the dystopian setting is decently depicted. If this were an IntroComp entry, I would have voted for it to win. As an IFComp entry, well, there's just not enough here to get excited about.
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